Boy in the Tower

Polly Ho-Yen's Boy in the Tower is a story for 9 year olds told by a boy watching his city fall down from a seventeenth-floor window.

What happens

Ade loves that window. He knows which numbers are painted on the roofs of the buses, which old man sleeps on the park bench with no shoes on, what time the milk crates arrive at the little row of shops.

He also knows his mum has not left the flat in months. He does the shopping now. He takes her bank card to the cash machine and waits until nobody is around, exactly the way she taught him. He makes the dinner out of a tin. He is still at primary school.

Then the plants come. Ade calls them Bluchers and he was one of the first people to see them, sitting up on his windowsill. Buildings start coming down. An old boarded-up pub first. Then more.

The clever thing is that both disasters are the same shape. Something creeps in quietly while nobody is watching, and afterwards the world is smaller than it was.

Ade's voice carries the whole book. He sorts everything into Before and After and admits he would rather think about Before. He is very funny about school broccoli. He goes careful and slightly formal whenever he talks about his mum, the way children do when they have decided to manage something on their own.

His friend Gaia is the other joy in it. She lip-reads, so the pair of them always know what the teachers are saying before anyone else. It is how they found out the head teacher's first name. (Gordon.)

Now the part you will want to know about beforehand.

Ade's mum is not simply a worrier. Early in the book, told as something that has already happened, he comes home to find her badly beaten. One eye swollen shut. A cut across her cheek. She will not say who did it, she never goes to the police, and after that she stops going out and mostly stops getting up. He asks her to see a doctor and she rolls over to face the wall.

It is handled with enormous care and it is completely unflinching. A child who has watched an adult they love stop coping will recognise this book, possibly more than you would like them to. Read it near them rather than handing it over.

For a reader who can take it, this is a very kind book about a child carrying far too much, and the disaster half gives them somewhere safe to put the feeling.

What to read next

Polly Ho-Yen does something similar in Where Monsters Lie. Effie's village throws food into the loch every solstice to keep the monsters quiet, her rabbit gets out of a locked hutch, and then her mum goes missing too.