I couldn’t quite figure out sometimes if things in this book were supposed to be funny or not and having to think about it got a little annoying. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was so good, and this is entertaining enough.. But something felt missing in this one.

The story is all third person but alternates between the points of view of a four family members, each of whom is in the midst of their own (up until now) private crisis. It reads quick because the chapters are so short and lead into each other, almost J.K.-Rowling-style. What I liked about it was how a lot of the interwoven stories involve miscommunication, so one chapter will have a character realizing or deciding on something only to find another character reveal something in the following chapter that will foreshadow an impending conflict.

Maybe it was that one gory chapter that I couldn’t even read that spoiled it for me. I carried a certain level of anxiety that there would be some kind of reprise for the rest of the book. Needless to say, I probably wouldn’t have read the book if it had come with this cover or one involving of these drawings by Haddon.