Wood maintains the boy’s unknowability by allowing just one (heartrending) scene from his point of view, which walks a thin line between sweet and saccharine, resulting in a devastating story. The author ( Any Bitter Thing) reveals the prickly old woman’s life story, beginning in Lithuania, through the boy’s 10-part recorded interview with her Ona slowly comes to realize what a gift his questions were, while the reader gains understanding into her character. This penance for being an absentee father turns into something even greater as he and his grief-stricken twice-ex-wife take up the boy’s hope for Ona to set a world record as the oldest licensed driver. His father, an itinerant guitarist named Quinn, decides to finish earning the child’s Boy Scouts badge by doing yard work for the 104-year-old Ona Vitkus. This idiosyncratic and earnest list-making boy without friends dies as strangely-“the first symptom is usually death”-as he lived. Wood never names the 11-year-old boy at the center of her bittersweet new novel he is referred to as “the boy” from the start.
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