Perfect
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4.1 • 18 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the international bestseller, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, comes another exquisite and emotionally resonant novel about the search for the truth and unconditional love.
On a foggy spring morning in 1972, twelve-year-old Byron Hemming and his mother are driving to school in the English countryside. On the way, in a life-changing two seconds, an accident occurs. Or does it? Byron is sure it happened, but his mother, sitting right next to him in the car, has no reaction to it. Over the course of the days and weeks that follow, Byron embarks on a journey to discover what really happened--or didn't--that fateful morning when everything changed. It is a journey that will take him--a loveable and cloistered twelve-year-old boy with a loveable and cloistered twelve-year-old boy's perspective on life--into the murkier, more difficult realities of the adult world, where people lie, fathers and mothers fight without words, and even unwilling boys must become men. Byron will have to reconcile the dueling realities of that summer, a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit and the power of compassion.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Author Rachel Joyce follows her debut novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, with another remarkable and moving book. Perfect revolves around two connected plots that unfold in alternating chapters. One is about a 12-year-old boy whose beautiful, fragile mother is responsible for a car accident in 1972. The other follows Jim, a severely ill mental patient who's hit by a car whose driver he knows and admires. These two stories are told with laconic precision—every volley of dialogue and description is completely necessary. Joyce also has a near-magical way of enriching her prose with layers of unexpected meaning. Readers will burrow deep into the gloomy and foreboding locale of Cranham Moor, where the two accidents occur, eager to find out how these storylines are connected.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An 11-year-old boy makes an error that brings tragedy to several lives, including his own, in Joyce's intriguing and suspenseful novel. One summer day in a small English village in 1972, Byron Hemmings's mother, Diana, is driving him and his younger sister to school when their Jaguar hits a little girl on a red bicycle. Diana drives on, unaware, with only Byron having seen the accident. Byron doesn't know whether or not the girl was killed, however, and concocts a plan called "Operation Perfect" to shield his mother from what happened. Previously, she has always presented the picture of domestic perfection in trying to please her martinet banker husband, Seymour, and overcome her lower-class origins. After Byron decides to tell her the truth about the accident, she feverishly attempts to make amends by befriending the injured girl's mother, but her "perfect" facade begins to splinter. Joyce sometimes strains credibility in describing Diana's psychological deterioration, but the novel's fast pacing keeps things tense. Meanwhile, in alternate chapters, Jim, a psychologically fragile man in his 50s, endures a menial cafe job. Joyce, showing the same talent for adroit plot development seen in the bestselling The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, brings both narrative strands together in a shocking, redemptive (albeit weepily sentimental) denouement. The novel is already a bestseller in England.
