Illustration: Celia Krampien
This is one of those rare books that I picked up and read the first couple of pages, just to get a feel of what it might be like, then hardly put it back down until I’d finished it. It’s that engaging!
Very American - and why wouldn’t it be?
However it does come with a bit of a warning. Although the author now lives in Canada, this is an American book. Now I am a great admirer of a number of American children’s authors, including this one, but their books can be difficult to get hold of over here However, Simon Sort Of Says, seems, thankfully, to be accessible at present through several of the major UK online booksellers*.That’s not the thing though. You see, some American books are very American, some moderately so, and others, to us, feel almost familiar. The thing is that this is one of the ones that is VERY American. To read it UK kids will need to have seen loads of US TV shows and films (sorry, movies) and the like. But, actually,most of them have, so, probably this isn’t a thing after all. And even if the odd word (or ten!) isn’t familiar, then a bit of contextual guessing supplemented by a little googling only adds to the fun.
American humour- and very funny it is too
Having got that out of the way, I can say is that this book is really (and I mean REALLY) funny. As long as you can appreciate it, it exudes that very classicallyAmerican, riotous humour that combines brilliant dry wit with ludicrously farcical situations. (If you can think updated Marx Brothers, but with smart-ass kids, then you are kinda getting there.)
The hyper-imaginative, if ludicrous, setting for all this hilarity is provided when protagonist Simon moves with his family to the fictional small Nebraska town of ‘Grin and Bear It’ where the internet and other forms of electronic device are banned so that resident radio astronomers can listen out for signals from outer space. Simon’s mother is a funeral director, and their new home is the upstairs of her business premises (with occasional corpses downstairs, a basement piled with jars of embalming fluid, and a mightily vicious peacock already resident in the surrounding ‘garden of rest’. Meanwhile his sackbut-playing father holds the position of assistant priest at a local Catholic church where (controversial) disaster strikes when an intrusive squirrel gnaws through the communion box and consumes the consecrated host, becoming what Simon’s mother irreverently describes as ‘thirty percent Jesus by volume.’
The plot that eventually emerges out of this mayhem concerns Simon himself (‘Clearly I’m not the brains of the outfit. I’m the snacks and repressed trauma of the outfit,’), and two new friends, goat farmer’s daughter, Agate (‘both cool and a tiny bit serial killer’) and super-bright, Astro-physicist’s son, Kevin, (‘red shirt with green hair . . . his extreme skinniness makes him look like The Grinch Who Stole Football Tickets’). Together they try to try to fool the listening astrophysicists by faking signals from an alien intelligence (with the best of motives). There’s a puppy, a trainee assistance dog, in there too, just to add a touch of adorable warmth to the mix, not to mention a farm-full of rampant, recalcitrant emus.
A particularly American issue - or is it?
Yet humour is not all that this book is about, not by a long way. It has a devastatingly serious core. It soon becomes clear that Simon has experienced some sort of trauma, resulting in him and his family having to try to deal with his regular debilitating panic attacks. It gradually emerges that he was the only survivor of a mass shooting of children in his former school class. The family move has been to try to give him a fresh start away from constant media attention, as well as from his continual reliving of the trauma. Initially he copes, but things reach a new low when the small community of which he is now part, including the kids in his new school class, learn about his past.
This intertwining of deeply serious issues and riotous comedy is quite brilliantly, as well as sensitively, handled by this skilled author, and the book is as thoughtfully affecting as it is entertaining. Simon desperately wants to be treated as the person he is now, not as some sort of notorious sympathy figure, ‘the kid who survived’.
I particularly like the way Erin Bow ends this story, not by frantically tying up lose ends, and certainly not by providing a sentimentally optimistic resolution to everything. What she does show is that time, resilience and the support of true friends can begin to lead towards healing. And this is a wonderful message for readers to take away.
A book to fall for
This is writing of a particular style that American writers do wonderfully well. Maybe it is a kind of writing that only American writers can do. Certainly no one (even Americans) does it better than Erin Bow does here. Grab it whilst you can for a very particular reading treat - a book that is wildly funny yet, in and amongst, thoughtful in a profoundly human, compassionate and inclusive way. Mass school shootings may be a particularly American issue (although sadly not exclusively) and we here in UK should be hugely grateful for our own much stricter gun control. But extreme anxiety in children, resulting from traumatic or other disturbing experience is found here too. This book helps us all to understand those affected (and ourselves) better, which is a most valuable thing. At an even more universal level, it is a celebration of the healing power of family and friends, and how worth reading and sharing is that.
Helping to make this physical book a particularly beautiful object, Celia Krampien’s striking cover illustration captures brilliantly many of the story’s key elements and qualities.
*Amazon, but also Blackwell’s or Waterstones online.