The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood
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| Title: The One-in-a-Million Boy Author: Monica Wood Published: April 5th 2016 Publisher: Headline Review Pages: 416 To cheek this book on amazon go to this link |
Synopsis:
The story of your life never starts at the beginning. Don't they teach you anything at school?
So says 104-year-old Ona to the 11-year-old boy who's been sent to help her out every Saturday morning. As he refills the bird feeders and tidies the garden shed, Ona tells him about her long life, from first love to second chances. Soon she's confessing secrets she has kept hidden for decades.
One Saturday, the boy doesn't show up. Ona starts to think he's not so special after all, but then his father arrives on her doorstep, determined to finish his son's good deed. The boy's mother is not so far behind. Ona is set to discover that the world can surprise us at any age, and that sometimes sharing a loss is the only way to find ourselves again.
My Review:
You know, one meets so many people, the years pass and pass, but there are certain times, certain people— . . . They take up room. So much room. I was married to Howard for twenty-eight years and yet he made only a piddling dent in my memory. A little nick. But certain others, they move in and make themselves at home and start flapping their arms in the story you make of your life. They have a wingspan.
This was one of my favorite books, for the plot, the writing, and the brilliant way in which Monica Wood builds established characters and has them tell their stories, with all the heartbreaks and mistakes that people make. The One-in-a-Million Boy, will melt your heart and leave its mark.
The book explores the life of a father, Quinn, struggling with the death of his young son with whom he had never made a bond with. His wife, Belle, who battles daily in mourning for the boy, and 104-year-old Ona, who befriended their somewhat OCD child after it had assigned him to help her once a week for the Boy Scouts. Ona becomes a tie to the boy for both grieving parents when Quinn fulfills his son’s commitment to helping Ona around the house.
It moves back and forth between the present lives of these three and the past interactions of “the boy” with Ona, but also with his father. The death of the boy brings his father and mother into Ona’s life, and slowly, progressively they too find a way to reconcile what was and their predispositions about what was with what really is.
This novel is not so much about a young boy who has died, but, a story about those that he leaves behind and the positive impression he left on the lives he touched. A book about friendship. The author illuminates just how remarkable every close friendship can be; how they can develop and shine under the most unusual circumstances, between the most unlikely candidates; but mostly, how they can change the course of lives, adding purpose and meaning. The book is also about grief and guilt and how in some circumstances these two can drive people toward rewards and accomplishments.
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