“These signs of care made him careful. He wanted to be generous – no to appear generous, but to be so.” – Monica Wood, The One-in-a-Million Boy

 

The One-in-a-Million Boy defines the word bittersweet. In many ways, this novel is about grieving but ultimately it is about how through a life remembered, we can become more than who we were before.

The boy, who is never named, dies of a one-in-a-million complication with his medication. Left behind are a 104 year-old woman named Ona, who had befriended the boy just months before his death, and his twice-divorced parents, Belle and Quinn. In case your are worried about the premise of this novel, I will say right off the bat that I am not interested in books that use the death of a child as a kind of cheap trick to invoke an emotional response in the reader.

But this is not that kind of book.

Although Woods is certainly using the boy’s death as a way of exploring heavy subject like grief and regret, she does this with a high degree of sensitivity and at no point did I feel that she was trying to exploit the reader’s emotions. On the contrary, I think the book does an excellent job of making the reader understand why the boy was so special to the adults in his life in ways that felt very real. The boy dies before the novel opens, but he feels very present throughout because of the people who cared about him. Wood uses his loss to gently probe the ways her characters react to their grief: Ona becomes determined to see through the plans she and the boy had made to get her into his beloved Guinness Book of World Records, Belle is completely undone by the loss of her son and Quinn feels he has no right to grieve because he was a largely absent father who struggled to connect to his quirky son while he was alive.

A novel like this risks tipping into sentimentality but Woods keeps this from happening by using moments of humor and sadness in equal measure. We get a sense of the boy through Ona’s memories of him, and the meticulous lists he kept to help him navigate his world. Ona is first introduced to the boy as a Scout who is tasked to help her around her house for 10 Saturdays. When the boy doesn’t show up one week, his father arrives instead, dedicated to seeing his son’s task through to completion. The relationship that develops between Ona and Quinn is the driving force behind the plot, but the boy’s influence is a constant undercurrent as the events of the novel unfold.

If heart-warming stories appeal to you, then I think it’s hard to go wrong with The One-in-a-Million Boy. It will have you laughing and crying, sometimes on the same page. Until next time, happy reading!