The narrator, a young man named Matthew, struggles with schizophrenia and grapples with the long-ago death of his brother, for which Matthew feels responsible.
My thoughts
Matthew shares his experiences in a mostly irritating stream of consciousness. The stream-of-consciousness technique is brilliant when it's done right, but the problem here is that most of Matthew's stream of consciousness isn't very interesting. He's also self aware—but not in a good way. He has an annoying habit of going, "Well, I'm going to introduce you to this person and here are a bunch of inane details and this one thing will be important, but not for fifty pages." I hate it when authors try to build suspense by dropping hints and screaming at you to pay attention. It doesn't feel organic and disrupts the flow of the story.
The central hook of the novel is the death of Matthew's older brother, who had Down Syndrome. Simon died a decade ago and Matthew feels responsible. The answers to the questions "why?" and "what happened?" are strung out over several hundred pages, and there just isn't enough meat to the story to drag it out that long.
I was drawn to this book because the author is a mental health nurse and it was a highly regarded debut novel (you think I would've learned to be more cautious after my disappointing experience with Absolution). Between this and Sarah's Key I'm really starting to doubt my ability to pick a good book.
Bottom line
There have got to be better debut novels out there.
Fine print
Where the Moon Isn't, by Nathan Filer (interestingly, it's published as The Shock of the Fall in the UK, where Filer is from and the novel takes place)
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.
