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Summary
Summary
From master storyteller David Almond comes a gripping, exquisitely written novel about a hidden-away child who emerges into a broken world.
Billy Dean is a secret child. He has a beautiful young mother and a father who arrives at night carrying the scents of candles and incense and cigarettes. Birds fly to his window. Mice run out from his walls. His world is a carpet, a bed, pictures of the holy island, and a single locked door. His father fills his mind and his dreams with mysterious tales and memories and dreadful warnings. But then his father disappears, and Billy's mother brings him out into the world at last. He learns the horrifying story of what was saved and what was destroyed on the day he was born, the day the bombers came to Blinkbonny. The kind butcher, Mr. McCaufrey, and the medium, Missus Malone, are waiting for him. He becomes The Angel Child, one who can heal the living, contact the dead, bring comfort to a troubled world. But there is one figure who is beyond healing, who comes looking for Billy himself -- and is determined on a kind of reckoning.
Author Notes
David Almond was born on May 15, 1951 in the United Kingdom. He writes novels for children and young adults including The Savage, Slog's Dad, My Name Is Mina, The Boy Who Swam with Piranhas, and The Tightrope Walkers. He has received numerous awards including the Carnegie Medal for Skellig, two Whitbread Awards, the Michael L. Printz Award for young-adult books for Kit's Wilderness, the Smarties Prize and the Boston Globe Horn Book Award for The Fire-Eaters, the 2015 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize for A Song for Ella Grey, and the Hans Christian Andersen Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A boy named Billy Dean-born at the very moment terrorists blew up his town, starting World War III-narrates this mesmerizing post-apocalyptic tale from Carnegie- and Printz-winner Almond. Written in a difficult Geordie dialect, further complicated by Billy's phonetic spellings, the novel speaks feelingly to the love between parent and child, as well as the harm parents can do. Billy Dean's mother, Veronica, was seduced by the local priest; amid the carnage of the "day of doom" on which Billy is born, Father Wilfred persuades Veronica to lock the newborn in a secret back room of her small house to cover up the priest's indiscretion. Billy Dean doesn't emerge from hiding until age 13, slowly acclimating to a crumbling and unfamiliar world: "I am dazzld by the sky that has no end to it & by the numba of things that lie owt ther. I watch the way the breez moves through the rubbl & lifts the dust & how it blows the foliaj of the trees that gro up through the ruwins." (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Almond presents his own post-apocalyptic take on our world: "This tail is told by 1 that died at birth by 1 that came into the world in days of endles war at the moment of disaster. He grew in isolayshon wile the enjins of destrucshon flew smoke rose over the sitys." Almond's story amounts to a saint's life (complete with allusions to the medieval Life of St. Cuthbert): Billy grows up a secret child, locked in a tiny room with his mother, visited infrequently by his father, a philandering priest. Outside is Blinkbonny, a bombed-out town on Britain's northeast coast, home of "treshur hunters" and the bereaved. When Billy's father disappears for good, Billy emerges as "the Aynjel Childe," a medium who contacts the dead and heals the living. Almond's earthy mysticism is made especially potent by uneducated Billy's eccentric, phonetic spelling and poetic imagination. "The pensil wanders across the payper lyk a little beest creepin hoaplesly across the rubbl," he writes of trying to shape the narrative of his own life -- a story filled with Roman Catholic imagery, violence, affection, sorrow for the dead, and a profound, appreciative wonder for nature. Rich, dense, and memorable. deirdre f. baker (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* At the very moment the bombs of the next war began exploding on the island of Blinkbonny, a child was born: Billy Dean, whose birth was seen by his priest father as a miracle. Hoping to raise a saint, his father ordains that the boy be brought up in secret. Then, when Billy is 13, a family calamity forces him to take his first steps into the light. From the first page, readers will know they're in the presence of a master of dialect He grew up with birds & mise as friends. He wos a secrit shy & thick & tungtied emptyheded thing. Almond's command of Billy's struggling English is a tour-de-force, even when the plot wanders away from full engagement. It is, at least, a passionately unusual story, involving Billy's speshal site, which is co-opted by a local spirit medium. Soon Billy is a reluctant Ayngle Childe, whose fame as a healer begins to spread off of the island. Throughout, Almond's details are fierce and bizarre, from the book Billy crafts from rat skins to the fragments of a Jesus statue he and his mother uncover from church ruins. Both of Billy's parents are powerful characters one of light, one of darkness and, of course, there is Billy himself, an absolutely unforgettable creation. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: One of the most critically acclaimed YA authors working today, Almond refuses to rest on his laurels, and here he delivers his finest book in years. Expect raves, then demands.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-In this dark supernatural story of a hidden baby, a bombed-out community in a warring land, and reluctant healing powers, Billy Dean is an illegitimate child who has been kept locked up by his parents from his birth to age 13. He's confined in a room from which he may not and does not wish to leave. His mother, Veronica, loves Billy Dean, but is dominated by his father, the charismatic priest Wilfred, an alternately caring and tormented individual with godly delusions. After Wilfred abandons them, Billy Dean has a traumatic introduction to the world, where he meets several remaining members of the destroyed community of Blinkbonny. The midwife who had delivered Billy Dean believes that he will develop the ability to contact the dead and, sure enough, he channels many departed, though it causes him searing agony. His powers expand to include healing the injured, sick, and disabled. The story climaxes in bloody, multiple murders which seem to free Billy Dean to leave Blinkbonny and establish a somewhat normal life. Almond narrates, and each character is easy to visualize, although some may find Almond's heavily accented pronunciation (e.g. "whale" for "while;" "who-liness" for "holiness") difficult to understand. Also, because Billy Dean tells his story as an adult looking back, there may be little that teens connect with in this tale. For upper grades where the author's other books are popular.-Rebecca James, Nashville Public Library, TN (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Billy Dean is a secret child, hidden away in a back room behind a locked door. He whiles away the time looking for mice and birds and gazing in wonderment at the pictures of the Holy Island that someone has hung on his wall. His violently unpredictable father arrives to teach the boy his letters and to ask about the dreams and visions he sometimes has. When his father disappears the people of Blinkbonny look to Billy for some kind of resolution to their grief. Does this innocent, kept for years in his cell-like room, really have supernatural powers? Can he communicate with the dead? Whose faces did he see in the lucid dreams and visions he experienced in his long isolation? Almond's first book for adult readers is not only dramatically and emotionally suspenseful, it is also vividly drawn and wonderfully well paced. Full of poignant moments and comic scenes, it raises deeply unsettling questions about what happens to the innocent in a world where everybody wants something. John Burnside - John Burnside Billy Dean is a secret child, hidden away in a back room behind a locked door. He whiles away the time looking for mice and birds and gazing in wonderment at the pictures of the Holy Island that someone has hung on his wall. - John Burnside.
Kirkus Review
Billy Dean is the forbidden child of a priest and a hairdresser, born in the English village of Blinkbonny on a day of terrible destruction and locked away for all his 13 years. Much to the chagrin of his tempestuous, estranged father, Billy Dean struggles with words: "He wos a secrit shy thick tungtied emptyheded thing." He's a lonely boy, longing for his father's rare visits, muddling through Bible stories, and scratching out letters and pictures on dried-out mouse skins with blood-mixed ink. When Billy's lovely Mam finally exposes her son to the war-ravaged "shattad payvments" of Blinkbonny, Billy is overwhelmedand utterly wonderstruck. Local medium Missus Malone has her own plans for Billy, and as rumors spread of "The Aynjel Childe" and his power to cure the sick and speak to the dead, the boy becomes another kind of prisoner entirely. Skellig-creator Almond's books are always mystical--close to the warm, dark heartbeats of man and beast--but this one, spelled mostly phonetically to show how Billy Dean might actually have written it, is perhaps even more raw, sensuous and savage. Dark, unsettling and fluid as water, Almond's suspenseful tour de force considers the cycle of life, themes of war, God and godlessness, and, as ever, "How all things flow into each other." (Fiction. 14 up)]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
