An act of violence changes the lives of three siblings
This book is set in Oxfordshire, England in last several months of 1999. The story opens with Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang walking home from secondary school. Ordinarily the siblings take the bus, but today their dad was supposed to pick them up. When he did not show up, they proceeded to walk the almost-five-miles home. Along the way, they spotted something amiss far down off the side of the road. There was a boy in the field! At first glance, he seemed to be sleeping. Upon closer examination, they realized he had been stabbed in the legs. The two older kids stay with the boy as Duncan goes back to the road to flag down a car and get help.
In the course of the book, we ultimately get to know the boy in the field – Karel Lustig – and we learn who accosted him and why. And while solving that mystery is gratifying, that’s not at all what this book is about. Instead, it’s about the impact the incident had on the three Lang children. As the author says of Zoe, “She was still going to school, still studying, joking around with [her friend] Moira, doing her chores, but it was as if her hair had stopped growing. A change, invisible to most other people, had overtaken her.”
The Lang children are not the only ones who are changing in the three-month period of the novel. Their parents, Hal and Betsy, are also in flux. As the author says, “During his brief period as a Boy Scout, [Duncan] had learned that the compass has thirty-two points. Now he could say with confidence that each person in his family was heading toward a different one.”
In alternating chapters, the author takes us into the heads of the kids. Matthew, in his eighteen or nineteen-year-old way helps in the investigation of Karel’s case. Zoe and Duncan, on the other hand, look more to the future. They try to live life to the fullest just in case tomorrow does not come. For fifteen-year-old Zoe this means finding a boyfriend. For thirteen-year-old Duncan, finding his birth mother.
I liked the three main characters and therefore I was very content to be inside their heads for the majority of the book. This helped me understand fully how they – the kids and the parents – went off toward their own compass points and yet remained a close and loving family.
*****
If you like my writing, did you know I have four books in print? They are all available on my Etsy shop. My newest book, Love, Loss, and Moving On, is also available on Amazon.
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