Boy in the Tower by Polly Ho-Yen
What a delight! This book took me completely by surprise. It’s an outstanding middlegrade survival novel set in contemporary London but with a light sci-fi threat.
“Contaminayshon. I didn’t know what it meant but it sounded bad.”
No one noticed the Bluchers silently take root. Buildings crumbled, deadly spores poisoned the air, people died. Up on the seventeenth floor, Ade and his mum are trapped in their apartment. It’s lonely at first, but then critical supplies run low…
Ade is a winsome narrator: raw, vulnerable, practical; his voice idiosyncratic. He’s thoughtful, helpful, brave - but flawed too, and believably so. He worries about his best friend Gaia. She’s disappeared. Did she get to safety on time? Or is that her torch flickering at the window?
His mum is bedridden, traumatised by a violent attack. Ade worries about her too. She’s barely taken in the destruction of the outside world, leaving Ade no one to process the disaster with. But, wait? Is there someone else in the building too…?
I loved Boy in the Tower. It’s a tense, subtle band-of-survivors story, and reminded me of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. Highly recommended. Likely to be in my Top Ten Reads of the Year. It’s certainly interesting to read this in post-pandemic times.
