Is there something happening in the world causing me to gravitate to strange stories told by unreliable narrators which offer little to no resolution? There is no way to know, but I’m here to recommend another story that, while thrilling many readers, has left others scratching their chins and polishing their monocles while they try to unearth the key that they missed which would unlock the mystery and allow them to go about their merry ways confident that they’ve completed a sensical story and fully absorbed what it has to offer.
But like a ferris wheel that receives regular maintenance, you can trust this book to take you on a fun ride. It begins with a child being admitted to an all-boys temporary holding facility with mandatory educational elements. Eventually our narrator discovers a freshly buried body, there are a series of deaths, rumors of ghosts haunt the school, crude drawings are discovered, and wasps sting the heck out of someone on a gazebo. What makes this novel such a treat though, is the narrator’s hilariously mannered voice.
I recommend taking a gander at this excerpt from the beginning of the novel to determine if his delightfully high-falluting voice repels or attracts you.
“This is not a school,” said the Headmaster, whose nose was like a mushroom, somehow both silly and threatening. “It is a temporary holding facility with mandatory educational elements. You will be held until you are far enough along to care for yourself. No longer, no less. You will work, along with the other boys, to earn your room and board. You will be provided for, but you will not be comforted. Even if I wanted to comfort you, we have been forced by the economic realities of our situation to live simply. Add to that the fact that, by taking you on, we are now at a whopping thirty-one students, one beyond our maximum capacity as stated in the materials I’ve presented to the state every semester for more than ten years running. And yet here we are, facing what will likely prove to be one of our most difficult terms in all respects, I am sure of it. Run a facility as long as I have, and you start to develop a nose for these things.” He pulled a sheet of paper from his desk drawer and tore it in half. “Regardless, we will clothe you, feed you, and provide you a bed. You’ll receive a standard education. Nothing fancy. Enough to get by within these doors. But as far as things go out there”—he pointed toward the heavy oaken doors that had been barred behind me when I walked in—“as far as that goes, you will be on your own.”
If you enjoy it when someone calls the ropes they are bound with “hempen strictures,” then this is a book for you. If not, I suppose one could always return to the task of bleaching one’s bright clothing and calling health inspectors on street food vendors.
