Using strong visual imagery and occasionally alternating points of view, Holmes (My Sister the Sausage Roll) adroitly conveys the discord in a household haunted by the past. Homer Winthrop, the principle narrator and a young artist, yearns to know about his father, who died when he was a baby. But Homer's mother, a linguist who "heard words instead of what a person was saying," ignores her son's questions. As the novel opens, she is driving Homer and their housekeeper, Madeleine, to the coastal town in Maine where her late husband lived his final years. As the boy roams the streets, he feels a vague sense of familiarity and determines to learn something about his own history. He becomes convinced that "Fake Man," a strange, middle-aged man who disguises himself as someone much older, may hold the key. The author ably evokes an elegiac mood and crystallizes the essence of the characters in a few well-defined strokes. Homer, for example, notes the essential difference between his mother and Madeleine simply by observing their hair: "I opened my eyes and stared at the back of my mother's head: a circle with a bun in the middle, all perfect and neat. I stared at the back of Madeleine's: a boingy-haired triangle sticking out to the tips of her shoulders. A bird could be living in there." Holmes draws a detailed, complex portrait of the young protagonist, who gradually breaks his own code of silence to participate fully in the world around him. Ages 10-up. (May)
