The Mostly True Story of Jack

Kelly Barnhill's The Mostly True Story of Jack is an eerie small town fantasy for 10 year olds about a boy nobody can quite keep hold of.

What happens

Jack is driven out to Hazelwood, Iowa, and left there for the summer while his parents finish getting divorced. His mother spends the journey on the phone. When she tries to explain him to his aunt, she has to be prompted with his own name.

That is not a joke about busy parents. People genuinely slide off Jack. He has taped a little drawing of himself into every family photograph, because he is not in any of them.

Hazelwood, on the other hand, seems to have known he was coming.

Three children clock the car before he has even climbed out of it. Frankie has not spoken since he was eight, the year he disappeared for two months and came back with scars across half his face that nobody can explain. His twin sister Wendy wakes from a dream of bells. Out on his family's farm, Anders takes his shoes off and feels the ground start to hum.

And in the smartest house in town, a boy called Clayton complains to his father about a ringing in his ear, and his father goes very quiet and decides he is going to need a lot of magic.

Barnhill is brilliant at the feeling that everybody knows something. Jack's aunt and uncle are kind. They hug him, they leave notes on his dinner tray, and through the floorboards he hears them say they hope he will not hate them for what they need him to do.

This one is stranger and sadder than it looks, so it is worth a look first. The children are around thirteen. A child was taken from this town and came back hurt, and his scars are described often. A father is plotting against a boy he has never met. Most of all there is the quiet horror of a mother who cannot hold her own son in focus, which is played completely straight and lands hard.

If you've got a reader who enjoys being several steps behind the story, that is the whole pleasure here. The clues arrive early, they refuse to add up for ages, and the not knowing is the point.

Be aware too that this is a summer story with very little comfort in it early on. Read the first chapter together and you will know quickly.

What to read next

The Girl Who Drank the Moon is in the library too, by the same author. A frightened town hands over a baby every year, and the child who gets carried off into the forest is brought up by someone who knows exactly what she is and will not tell her.