Cookie Jar - Jack Johnson

The Child Who

Author: Simon Lelic
Pages: 303
Review Copy Acquired from: Penguin Books

Brief Summary:
Due to luck, although whether good or ill is sometimes hard to determine, Leo Curtice a small town solicitor becomes the lawyer for the biggest case in a long time. A twelve-year-old boy, Daniel Blake, has been accused of brutally murdering a girl just one year younger. Although this case is excellent for Leo's career, it's tearing his family apart, but he just cannot give up on the child.

Review:
My thoughts on this one were rather mixed. I'll start with the good: the subject matter. The subject and the ethical questions associated with dealing with crimes by youth is fascinating to me. Given the horrid nature of his crimes, should Daniel be tried as an adult? Does his youth mean that he shouldn't be culpable?

Reading this book really made me think about these questions and innumerable others. I also thought, too, about the reactions people had to Daniel's crime. All of the flak that Leo took for trying to do his job and be this kid's solicitor was ridiculous. I just fail to understand why anyone would send him hate mail or protest him for fulfilling his role in the country's justice system.

Moving into the problems here...I think I would have preferred this if it were from the perspective of a child psychologist or something like that. Leo's understanding of Daniel is limited, and we see through his eyes any time Daniel's actually present. Even when he gets Daniel to talk, he doesn't know the right questions to ask or have any analysis to bear. Even when he gets a psychologist to speak with Daniel and she diagnoses a couple of things, nothing really comes of it because Leo isn't smart enough or isn't the right kind of smart to do anything with it.

What really got to me, though, was the writing style. For one thing, the sentences are really simple, which could be a stylistic decision, but just made the whole thing choppy and hard to read. Also, the third person narration tended to follow along with a character, but who changed from chapter to chapter. Lots of authors use this technique, but, here, it was rather difficult to parse. I think the reason it was so troublesome for me was that, rather than using the character's name at the beginning of each section, Lelic always refers to them merely as he or she, so I spent several sentences/paragraphs of each one trying to determine who the heck I was reading about.

On top of that, the story jumped around in time, which, again, can be used effectively but was not here. Instead of amping up the shock value or creating interesting comparisons, this method created confusion and removed the surprises. There was one twist of sorts, but I wasn't interested enough in the characters to care about it particularly.

All of that aside, Lelic has won awards for his mystery writing, so don't dismiss him based solely on my review. His style just doesn't work for me personally. If you think you might like this, give it a try, or check out one of his other books. His style just doesn't work for me personally.

Rating: 2/5

"'Well, it wasn't me,' says the boy with the gun,
'Sure I pulled the trigger, but it needed to be done,
Because life's been killing me ever since it begun.
You can't blame me, 'cuz I’m too young.'"