Murder Mystery meets Curious Incident
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The Blurb:
Whatever happens, don’t tell anyone what you did to Bee Larkham…
Jasper is not ordinary. In fact, he would say he is extraordinary…
Synaesthesia paints the sounds of his world in a kaleidoscope of colours that no one else can see. But on Friday, he discovered a new colour – the colour of murder.
He’s sure something has happened to his neighbour, Bee Larkham, but no-one else seems to be taking it as seriously as they should be. The knife and the screams are all mixed up in his head and he’s scared that he can’t quite remember anything clearly.
But where is Bee? Why hasn’t she come home yet? Jasper must uncover the truth about that night – including his own role in what happened…
The Review
I had been meaning to read this for a while, I remember it getting quite a lot of hype earlier this year and lots of comparisons to 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the night-time', which is a book I adore. It also features on several 'Books you must read in 2018' lists and so I caved when I came across it in a BOGOHP deal at the airport. (Plus I think the cover is clever and beautiful so I wanted a physical copy for my bookshelf)
There are similarities between this and 'The curious incident...' - both of the male protagonists are young teenagers with 'disabilities' that mean they cannot perceive or understand the world around them in the same way as everyone else. Both of them think they know that something terrible has happened, but they can't quite reconcile it with their unique understanding of the world.
Jasper, our protagonist, has prosopagnosia (face blindness) and synaesthesia (meaning that he experiencdes all the sounds of the world as a kaleidoscope of colours). Both fascinating conditions, especially in the midst of a murder mystery. The whole story is told through Jasper's narrative, and a lot of the time he can't make sense of the events happening around him and comes to the wrong assumptions. Often, you as the reader know you aren't getting the full story and are forced to play Detective whilst reading between the lines.
For me, this missed a lot of the gentle humour that was so wonderful in 'The Curious incident...' and so it sometimes just became a bit, dare I say it, boring? Couple that with the fact that this is actually a really long book and I'm afraid that at times I wasn't quite as enthralled as I wanted to be. I also wonder if Jasper is actually quite as endearing as the author intended him to be. Occasionally I found him just a tad annoying!
However, this is a beautifully written and very cleverly crafted story. The best thing about this book is how well the author manages to paint a picture (play on words intended!) of what having a condition like synaesthesia must be like. The descriptions used were often breathtaking and it's probably worth reading just for that.