THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS by Karen Perry
Pages: 350
Date: 23/01/2015
Grade: 3
Details: Reading Group Monthly read
Own
The blurb:
“Three-year-old Dillon vanished in
the middle of the night. His father Harry can't forgive himself for not
protecting his only child. Yet Harry isn't blamed by his wife Robin: she bares
her own secret guilt.
Five years later, thousands of
miles away, Harry spots an eight-year-old boy in a crowd - a boy he is
convinced is Dillon.
Desperate to find his missing son,
Harry's obsession tears apart his marriage, exposing shameful secrets and
shattering the one thing he and Robin had left - trust.
Why won't Robin believe Harry?
What is she hiding? Can the boy really be Dillon? And how far will Harry go to
find their lost son?
The Boy That Never Was is a deeply
atmospheric and masterfully crafted tale of love and loss that will chill you
to the bone. Fans of Rosamund Lupton and Sophie Hannah will fall in love with
this debut from Karen Perry.”
My thoughts:
I’m always disappointed when a book
doesn’t live up to my expectations but this time it hits me a little bit harder
than normal. I bought nine copies of this book just before Christmas and gave
one to each of my reading group members. The blurb sounded exciting and the
endorsements on and in the cover were more than glowing:
“Truly remarkable” - Jeffrey Deaver
“ Gripping...this tense, unpredictable
novel blends a thriller with an intimate family story to produce a most
compulsive read” - John Boyne
“A beautifully written mystery is
gripping stuff” - Tana French
I don’t usually pay a lot of attention
to endorsements by other authors but these caught my attention since I’m both a
fan and admirer of each of those writers. Buying ‘The Boy That Never Was’
appeared to be a very safe bet. Except that it wasn’t and I now find myself in
the strange situation where I fervently hope my reaction to this book was
personal and mood or genre related.
I had more than one issue with this
book.
For starters I had the twist – at least
I think it was supposed to be a twist or a surprise – worked out before I
reached the half way mark of this story. I hoped the author would pull an unexpected
rabbit out of her writing-hat and prove me wrong, but that didn’t happen.
I couldn’t get involved in the unravelling
Robin and Harry’s relationship because I never saw their bond as being tight.
Watching love die is not that hard when you never quite believed the love was
there to begin with. What’s more, I didn’t like either of them; not the way they
were before they lost Dillan and not the way they were portrait afterwards. As
a result I wasn’t really invested in whether or not they would manage to hold
it all together.
And finally, and I know this is a very
personal pet peeve, the frequent use of the words ‘in that moment’ got on my
nerves very early on.
Overall I liked the basic idea behind
this story and, apart from the repetition mentioned above, the writing was
quite good, especially for a debut. Unfortunately neither was enough for me to
lose myself in the story or care about the characters or outcome. Fingers
crossed my reading group members enjoyed it more than I did.
