THE ONE-IN-A-MILLION BOY
Monica Wood
Headline/Hachette
By MIKE CROWL
This book, which is about grief and life and laughter and music and the Guinness Book of Records, could have been just another book about an autistic-type child, the sort who regularly features in novels these days.
Yes, the boy at its centre certainly has his oddball traits (needing 10 of everything, making lists of everything) but other than that he's a delight, and probably no odder than the rest of us.
It could have been a novel about foul-mouthed musicians.
But Quinn, the boy's father, is a gentle, somewhat driven guitar-player, a self-deprecating man who struggles to reconcile being a father with being a muso.
And even the band he has the most to do with is a Christian one, so foul language hardly occurs.
The central character is Ona Vitkus, 104 years old, and thriving.
A wonderful creation, surly, snarky, loving, generous, and vastly more alive than she gives herself credit for.
The boy, earning a Scout merit badge, sets her on a path to becoming the oldest person in the world, and she has such determination that she could well make it.
The other major character, Quinn's twice-ex-wife Belle, isn't someone I easily warmed to.
Her behaviour can be attributed to the loss of her son, but her sudden switches of mood, and the bitter and patronising way she speaks to her ex-husband (aided by her even more forthright and sarcastic sister) didn't quite convince me, even by the end of the book.
Perhaps she needs an actress in a movie version to bring the subtext to life and make her more coherent.
I'm a great skimmer of books, but Wood's writing is such that you find you can't skim: skip over a line or two, or a paragraph, and you'll have to go back and read it properly, because each line reveals something more about the characters and their world.
When I first encountered the book I thought: Do authors really need to keep producing books of 400 or more pages?
But this story has a life of its own beyond the book, and by the time I'd reached page 430 I almost didn't want it to stop; an unusual thing for me to say.
- Mike Crowl is a Dunedin author, musician and composer.
