It’s my second summer of reading middle-grade books and I’ve been having a great time.
A couple of marvelous books stand out.
The first is The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle. I am usually not a big fan of realistic novels for this age group because they tend to be reductionist (“here’s the bully, here’s the inattentive parent, here’s our hero battling odds, here’s the specific trendy problem that appeals to NY publishers…”) and at first glance this seems like it fits all those categories.
But someone told me this was a great book, so I tried the first few pages and was hooked.
So how is this different? Mason’s narrative voice.
Leslie Connor pulled off something extremely hard to do: she gave us a first-person POV with an unreliable narrator who is extremely appealing. Mason doesn’t understand everything that he records as part of his story–but we do. Mason is fun to hang out with, and we end up liking him a lot, just as most of the people around him do. Yes, there are quite a few adults who should be paying more attention, but the reasons they don’t see what’s happening are believable, and mean no one except the actual bad guy looks anything other than human.
Mason has some pretty serious problems: extreme dyslexia, abnormal sweating, he’s too big for his age, and his parents are dead. Kids call him stupid, and it seems he doesn’t read other people’s emotions as well as we can, just from his descriptions. He lives with his grandmother and his uncle. Their lives were turned upside down by the death of Mason’s parents and by the death of Mason’s best friend — in mysterious circumstances. It is this mystery that’s the spine of the plot.
I won’t give too much away because it’s such a fun book to read you should discover it for yourself. My only quibble is that the villain was so completely villainous, and I wasn’t comfortable with the implication that his bad behavior was caused by an absent father. But we don’t really know much about the villain’s motivations, and it doesn’t really matter, because Mason is the star.
It was great to spend time with him, with Ms. Blinny (I loved Ms. Blinny) and the people in Mason’s world.