Thursday, July 15, 2010

The Boy on the Bus by Deborah Schupack *Review*



I wish I knew what to say about this book, but I don't. I wish the author knew where she was going with this story, but she didn't. I wish there had been a satisfying conclusion to the story, but there wasn't.


I was very disappointed in The Boy on the Bus. This short novel starts out with a mother who is waiting for her son to come home from school. But when the bus pulls up to her house, the boy on the bus is not her son. At least that's what the mother is sure of. He acts different, he seems strangely unfamiliar, and he even looks a bit older and more robust.
The author then takes us through a few days in their life as her and her partner Jeff and her daughter Katie try to know sort out what is going on. Jeff is away for months at a time at a job site in Canada- would he know if his son was acting different if he hasn't seen him in that long? Daughter Katie, away at boarding school gets called back for her opinion. She just thinks Charlie's acting weird.
Mother, Meg, left at home to shoulder the load of taking care of the household and her sickly, asthmatic eight-year-old is a little overwhelmed with life. She doesn't know what happened with her "real" son but she is determined to find out.
If this book would have been a mystery like it implied it could have made a good one. But the story went nowhere and with no resolution I was left hanging and a little stumped. Did I miss something? Did I not get it? More confused after I finished then when I started I would only give this 1/5 stars.