What I Did
A Novel
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“This is family life today at its most believable: warm and messy, bored and raging….I LOVED IT.”
—Emma Donoghue, author of the New York Times bestseller Room
What I Did by Christopher Wakling is a truly astonishing novel—the chronicle of a family crisis that is equal parts hilarity, poignancy, and horror, told in the singular voice of a most precocious youngster. Room meets The Slap meets The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Wakling’s tour de force concerns one rash act that pitches a six-year-old boy and his hapless parents into the center of a social services maelstrom. What I Did is contemporary fiction at its most enthrallingly original—poignant, powerful, and extremely funny—a miraculous work that prompted London’s Daily Mail to declare it “the novel that should have won the Booker prize.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wakling (Devil's Mask) creates a memorable narrator in Billy, a precocious and headstrong British six-year-old who understands the world through nature shows. When Billy runs into a busy street, his father, fear turning to rage, spanks him before the eyes of a nosy jogger. The jogger promptly calls child services, beginning a terrifying odyssey in which concerned agents of the state try to protect the boy from what they see as an abusive father. Not comprehending the gravity of the situation, Billy makes comments that unintentionally incriminate his father and drive the entire family closer to the breaking point. Much in the vein of Atonement, a well-intentioned innocent threatens to destroy the people he loves most, and Wakling clearly takes a childlike delight in the language of his narrator. The book is filled with amusing catachreses ("test buds" for "taste buds," for instance) that have an irresistible charm for the first hundred pages or so, after which the devices becomes irritating and the limited perspective hinders any larger point. But the novel is affecting, filled with many poignant scenes.
