Untouchable

Starred review from August 29, 2011
Bronson Pinchot proves the perfect choice to narrate this novel of grief, sorrow, and recovery. Eleven-year-old Whitley Darby—known as “The Kid”—refuses to accept his mother’s death. Instead, he convinces himself that she’s alive and will eventually return to him. To ensure that return, Whitley takes a vow of silence and communicates by writing in school notebooks. This behavior only adds to his alienation and the daily bullying he endures. Pinchot—with a soft, easy delivery—lovingly brings this melancholy story and its diverse characters to life. His narration is smooth and compelling, while the voices he lends Whitley and his father fully realize their sadness and despair. But Pinchot also manages to infuse each scene with a sense of hope. The result is heartfelt performance of a rich and deeply moving story. A Tyrus Books paperback.

February 14, 2011
A woman's death sends her trauma-site cleanup tech husband and their troubled son into a tailspin in O'Connor's heartfelt first novel (after novella Among Wolves). During the late days of the Y2K scare, David Darby mops up the gore left behind at suicide and crime scenes, and sleeps in his truck rather than in the bed he used to share with his wife. His son, fifth-grader Whitley (more commonly known as "The Kid"), meanwhile, refuses to believe his mother is dead and vows to remain mute until she returns. This doesn't do him any favors at school, where he's already something of an outcast. As Darby deteriorates, picking fights and pocketing souvenirs from death scenes, the Kid sets up a refuge of his own in a burned out house in their neighborhood. The story is involving and moves easily through material that could smother with treacle, but O'Connor's strong characters—especially the Kid, whose elementary school humiliations are especially well handled—and his ease with conveying their emotions keeps the novel afloat as father and son make small steps toward getting it together.

March 15, 2011
It has been a year since she diedthe wife of David Darby, the mother of Whitleyand in that time their perfect family unit has fractured until it is nothing but a maze of fissures. Davids job at a waste-disposal company (cleaning up the gore left by murders and suicides) always necessitated an emotional shutdown, but now that numbness has overtaken everything. Whitley, meanwhile, has become a sixth-grade pariah mocked for his perpetual silence, which he adopted as a sacrifice to God so that his mother would return. Both father and son are quiet and increasingly delusional, and to fill the void, they cling to talismans: the comic books Whitley draws, objects from cleanups that David steals, old tapes from Whitleys pretend talk show, Its That Kid! OConnors prose is as beautifully terse as his plot pattern is deliberate: work trauma, school trauma, repeat. But its an affecting mix, squeezing the readers emotions so that when the myth of the perfect family begins to dissolve through flashbacks, it feels like the inevitable waking from a halcyon dream.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)