Christopher Wakling’s What I Did comes at readers with the intensity and enthusiasm of a six-year-old. Billy Wright, the precocious protagonist narrates this story, harrowing and painfully real at times.
What do readers need to know about Billy? He loves wildlife documentaries, and his observational skills surpass those of most adults. He’s quite intelligent, and his storytelling style is typical of an excited six-year-old with a broad vocabulary (that frequently represents his misunderstanding of advanced words and phrases) and no self-imposed filter. This translates into a novel that reads differently than most contemporary fiction, but one that parents of young children will likely begin to understand early on.
As Billy states in the opening pages:
Sadly there are no light savers in this story. It is all real. It is about a terrible thing which happens to me. But watch out because the thing you think is the terrible thing isn’t really it. Other things come later and they’re worse. I’m not going to tell you what they are yet because now isn’t the time. That is called suspension.
I also have to warn you that nobody is bad or good here, or rather everyone is a bit bad and a bit good and the bad and good moluscules get mixed up against each other and produce terrible chemical reactions.
When Billy gets caught up in a moment, unable or unwilling to stop himself from running out onto a busy road, a chain reaction is kicked off. Billy’s father’s reaction may be judged in a variety of ways by different folks, though I found it to be highly believable and easy to understand given the circumstances. In the ensuing aftermath, Billy’s perspective, honest but not always clearly articulated, often complicates matters even more, putting this reader on the edge of my seat waiting to see how everything would play out.
If I had to sum up this novel in one word, no doubt that word would be disconcerting. At several points, I needed to put the book down to allow my mind to settle and reflect on how this fictionalized account of a relationship between a parent and a child relates to my own life. I’m left with the distinct impression that we adults do much too much talking and far too little listening when it comes to interactions with children, for poor Billy finds himself in the frustrating position of being misunderstood again and again, sometimes simply because the grown-ups don’t give him a chance to finish a thought. While I could relate to the character of Billy’s father in many ways, he also served as a cautionary tale for parents who may be just one bad afternoon away from his experience.
What I Did is one of those novels getting a lot of buzz in the world of book blogs and avid contemporary fiction readers, though I’ve as of yet steered clear of reading others’ takes on this novel that made me chuckle at the accurate portrayal of a young child, sigh in frustration at the turn of events, and hold my breath in anticipation of just how wrong things could eventually go. Have you read it? I’d love to hear your thoughts or the impressions you’ve gathered from other reviews you’ve read– hit me in the comments section!
Dawn hopes that her parenting practices never get placed under a microscope… hopefully no posts on her blog, my thoughts exactly, would come back to haunt her!