This style of writing won't suit everyone, but I enjoyed and appreciated it. It took me a while to adapt to the narrative style, but once I did, I felt transported into the mind of the main protagonist a teenage boy sent to a boarding school due to life circumstances. How to explain or categorize this book? It's like a buffet of poignant, hysterical, mystical, heretical, mysterious, and heartbreaking, told in a stream of consciousness style that rushes along with little punctuation. 'His own words seemed to make him angry and he stiffened and I knew I was looking straight at madness and madness isn’t a monster and it isn’t a stranger and it’s right there in the room and just a twitch away from all of us always and it can have high cheekbones and almond eyes and a strong jaw and sometimes it just comes from the corner of the room like a coil of soft smoke and you can’t stop it or fight it or waft it away.' Ĥ for most of the read, with moments of absolute brilliance:

When the boy's fear and hatred of authority come to a head, everything is thrown into disarray and his action lead him to run from the Fell. What he never does, however, is question his own version of reality. He meets ghosts, hears voices and battles his fears. The boy sees the world and his place in it through a unique lens. The boys in the home become his family and they band together against their enemies, both real and imagined, and they become family. The arrest of his sister Lilly later that summer brings the halcyon days to an abrupt end, and his family is torn apart, with Lilly sent to jail and the boy set to a boarding house for dysfunctional boys, far away from his home – The Fell.

He idolises his father – never more so than when he saves the life of a suicidal man – and he comes to believe that heroism is all. In an unspecified time and location, an unnamed boy is living what he feels to be an idyllic life in the faded and peeling Lido where his father is a lifeguard.

The Fell by Robert Jenkins