September 16, 2013
An 11-year-old boy makes an error that brings tragedy to several lives, including his own, in Joyce’s intriguing and suspenseful novel. One summer day in a small English village in 1972, Byron Hemmings’s mother, Diana, is driving him and his younger sister to school when their Jaguar hits a little girl on a red bicycle. Diana drives on, unaware, with only Byron having seen the accident. Byron doesn’t know whether or not the girl was killed, however, and concocts a plan called “Operation Perfect” to shield his mother from what happened. Previously, she has always presented the picture of domestic perfection in trying to please her martinet banker husband, Seymour, and overcome her lower-class origins. After Byron decides to tell her the truth about the accident, she feverishly attempts to make amends by befriending the injured girl’s mother, but her “perfect” facade begins to splinter. Joyce sometimes strains credibility in describing Diana’s psychological deterioration, but the novel’s fast pacing keeps things tense. Meanwhile, in alternate chapters, Jim, a psychologically fragile man in his 50s, endures a menial cafe job. Joyce, showing the same talent for adroit plot development seen in the bestselling The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, brings both narrative strands together in a shocking, redemptive (albeit weepily sentimental) denouement. The novel is already a bestseller in England.
October 15, 2013
The time is out of joint, as the follow-up to a popular novelistic debut brings a slightly darker edge to its fablelike whimsy. Having earned a best-selling readership in both the U.S. and her native Britain with The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012), Joyce returns with an even less likely but more ambitious piece of fictional fancy. The protagonist is 11-year-old Byron, a reflective and innocent schoolboy who becomes overly concerned when his best friend, James, tells him that two seconds will be added to this leap year to somehow even things out. After his mother assures him that "[w]hen it happens you won't notice. Two seconds are nothing," Byron responds, "That's what nobody realizes. Two seconds are huge. It's the difference between something happening and something not happening." And with the addition of those two seconds--or not--something happens--or not. And whether or not something happens, everything changes. A veteran of the stage and a radio playwright before turning to fiction, Joyce specializes in the sort of insights that some find charming, others cloying and a style that could sometimes pass for fairy tale, other times for Young Adult (though those readers wouldn't have much patience for her plotting). The novel alternates between chapters that follow what happens to Byron, his mother and their family (which the reader quickly realizes is more dysfunctional than Byron does) and ones that concern an adult sufferer of obsessive-compulsive disorder who resorts to menial labor when the British mental health system fails him. "No one knows how to be normal, Jim," a social worker tells him. "We're all just trying to do our best." The two plot lines must inevitably intersect, but the manner in which they do will likely surprise even the most intuitive reader. Many of those who loved the author's first novel should at least like her second.
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August 1, 2013
After an award-winning career as an actor and playwright, Joyce turned her hand to fiction and came up with last year's international best seller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Here, she's replaced enterprising retiree Harold Fry with equally enterprising 11-year-old Byron Hemmings, who's dismayed when his mother seems totally oblivious to a terrible event that happens while she's driving him and his sister through thick fog on the way to school. With good buddy James, the suddenly distrustful Byron hatches a plan to discover the truth.
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
December 1, 2013
England. 1972. Best friends Byron and James, both 11 years old, worry about the two seconds added to time because it is a leap year. While driving on a foggy morning, just as Byron is telling her about the two seconds, his mother, Diana, hits a little girl on a bicycle. The cascade of disasters quietly unleashed by the accident, which Byron blames on the added time, build to an almost unbearable tension, with the situation aggravated by Diana's suffocatingly controlling husband and her attempts to make things right with the little girl's mother. England. 2012. Jim, a former mental patient now in his early fifties, is living in his van while working at a restaurant. Nearly incapacitated by the relentlessly overwhelming rituals of his obsessive-compulsive disorder and a terrible stutter, he is befriended by the woman who accidentally runs over his foot with her car. VERDICT In alternating chapters, these two stories set 40 years apart frame Joyce's exquisitely played novel of tragedy and mental illness and the kind of wrenching courage unique to those who suffer from the latter and yet battle to overcome it. As in her brilliant debut, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Joyce stuns with her beautifully realized characters and the unexpected convergence of her two tales. [See Prepub Alert, 7/15/13.]--Beth Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from December 1, 2013
England. 1972. Best friends Byron and James, both 11 years old, worry about the two seconds added to time because it is a leap year. While driving on a foggy morning, just as Byron is telling her about the two seconds, his mother, Diana, hits a little girl on a bicycle. The cascade of disasters quietly unleashed by the accident, which Byron blames on the added time, build to an almost unbearable tension, with the situation aggravated by Diana's suffocatingly controlling husband and her attempts to make things right with the little girl's mother. England. 2012. Jim, a former mental patient now in his early fifties, is living in his van while working at a restaurant. Nearly incapacitated by the relentlessly overwhelming rituals of his obsessive-compulsive disorder and a terrible stutter, he is befriended by the woman who accidentally runs over his foot with her car. VERDICT In alternating chapters, these two stories set 40 years apart frame Joyce's exquisitely played novel of tragedy and mental illness and the kind of wrenching courage unique to those who suffer from the latter and yet battle to overcome it. As in her brilliant debut, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Joyce stuns with her beautifully realized characters and the unexpected convergence of her two tales. [See Prepub Alert, 7/15/13.]--Beth Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.