One of the Boys

Starred review from January 23, 2017
The unnamed boys of the title of Daniel Magariel’s spare and piercing debut novel are the 12-year-old narrator, his older brother, and their father. The trio are headed from Kansas to New Mexico to begin a new life after a brutal divorce and custody battle referred to by the father as “the war.” The narrator, complicit in lying about his mother’s negligence so his father could gain custody, at first treats his new life like the adventure he was promised that it would be. But when his father’s violent tendencies and severe drug addiction become increasingly apparent, the narrator finally begins to make sense of the divorce and the true source of the family’s demise. The urgent present action of the novel—in which the brothers adapt to their new life while tiptoeing around their erratic and largely absent father—is combined with flashbacks portraying life before the family’s collapse, ultimately creating a stunning and tragic portrait of both the joys and limitations of love. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency.

Starred review from April 1, 2017
In an apartment complex in suburban Albuquerque, a middle schooler and his older brother watch their father circle the drain and come very close to taking them down with him."This will end the war," says the boys' father the day they leave Kansas. "No custody. No child support....In New Mexico I'll be a kid again. We'll all be kids again." Actually, the day they leave town with their father, having conspired with him to have their mother stripped of parental rights, is the beginning of the end of their childhood. Shortly after they move into their new apartment, the narrator breaks into his father's locked room when he's out, hoping to find some change to buy food. Instead, he finds his father--with a metal pipe, a plate of white powder, and a lighter. So thoroughly has this man already twisted his son's thinking that the boy's first worry is that he'll be sent back to live with his mother. But of course he won't be. "We are all entitled to one bad habit," explains his father. "You guys have bad habits too. You pop your knuckles, don't you?" As the man keeps his younger son out of school, sabotages his older son's basketball career, whips them with the buckle end of his belt for imagined infractions, and leaves them to care for themselves for weeks on end, their allegiance becomes an act of ferocious, misguided heroism. "Sometimes in my mind I was my father. After all, weren't he and I totally beyond forgiveness?" Joining Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life in its brilliant picture of a boyhood twisted by abuse and Justin Torres' We the Animals in both its concision and its portrait of the bond between brothers, Magariel's debut is sure, stinging, and deeply etched, like the outlines of a tattoo. Belongs on the short shelf of great books about child abuse.

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August 1, 2017

Reading this short but forceful debut novel is like watching a disaster unfold on the evening news. Teens may wish they'd never tuned in, but they won't be able to look away. The story shifts backward and forward in time to reveal how a father systematically gains his two sons' complete devotion to further his own ends. Scheming with the boys to deprive their mother of her custody rights and using them to shield his growing drug addiction, the father knowingly pits the brothers against each other. But his constant demands isolate them from their peers. As their father turns increasingly violent, the brothers have only each other to turn to in their desperation. First-person narration from the younger boy, 12, is effective. His divided loyalties, guilt, and need to please his father in spite of everything are intensely relatable. Though this work moves toward an inescapably bleak climax, its brevity, surprising snippets of humor, and compelling plot make it a good pick for low-level or reluctant readers. VERDICT Schools and libraries that serve at-risk teens who use book discussion as part of their counseling will want this in their collections.-Cary Frostick, formerly at Mary Riley Styles Public Library, Falls Church, VA

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