The Witch’s Boy by Michael Gruber

In many ways, this is a very strong book. Rich text with deep threads make it mature and interesting. One day, a witch finds a boy in the forest and raises him, although she isn’t quite sure what she’s doing. Along the way there are colorful characters, well-thought out magic, some delightfully fractured fairytales and more than a few SAT vocabulary words. For me, what the story lacked was a “connection”. It was clever, it had fresh ideas, but the omniscient narrative voice was distancing and the story, which was essentially simple, took far too many twists to get to the point. Let’s start with narrative voice. In Kate DiCamillo’s “Tales of Despereaux” the narrator manages to connect to the reader through a kind of arch humor and sly asides. In this book, I’m not even sure the narrator ~likes~ any of the characters. Who is the protagonist here? I started out being a bit intrigued by the witch, but she is kept at emotional arms length for the duration of the tale (and disappears entirely at points) so I could never fully warm up to her. Then there’s the witch’s boy, “Lump”. The author intimates again and again how the boy is headed for trouble, and he, of course, progresses through the majority of the book as a kind of anti-hero, hurting everyone around him. The only characters I really identified with and enjoyed were the supporting characters – which is rarely compelling enough to push you through 377 pages of text. Then, there’s the storyline. It doesn’t so much move as it meanders. That which should have been prologue (the witch finding the boy and figuring out how to raise him) runs some 67 pages. Lastly, for all of the details given, I had difficulty placing the setting. I mean, I know this is fantasy, but at times it reads as 14th Century Germany, and at other times, 17th Century France. No matter how fantastical the setting, there should be some consistency. This tale throws out consistency for that which is convenient. I know I sound like I hated this book. I didn’t. As I said, it has a lot going for it, I just found it lacking in a key area or two. My copy of the book had extensive notes by the author at the end. In these notes, Mr. Gruber explained that the witch is essentially his own mother, an intriguing but (surprise) distant woman, and that Lump is essentially his early life, with much of the book being a kind of mea culpa for not being a better person. Clearly, Michael Gruber is a gifted writer. Wouldn’t it be ironic if he could distance himself more from his work and, as a result, create characters that one could better connect with?