Finn's Going (review)

Finn and Danny are twins, or rather, they were; shortly before their tenth birthday, a nighttime excursion to see otters left one brother drowned and the other traumatized, so traumatized, in fact, that he stops speaking, flings a brick through a window at a taxidermized otter, and runs away from home. He travels to an old family vacation spot, an island beach, trying to recapture the happy family times before the tragedy; there he connects with an adult recluse coming to terms with his own past pain through a huge mural—featuring, of all things, a huge otter—and learns his own way into acceptance and return home. This is poignantly and perceptively written, with the narrator believably ten in his meandering colloquial voice, in his rejoicing in brotherly fart contests, and in his unschooled agony at facing both a personal loss and a harsh truth about the possibilities of the world that makes him fear for everyone else he loves. The book deftly makes the otters into a motif that makes sense realistically as well as artistically, with their importance becoming clear as the backstory unfolds through the narration. The conceptual complications of the text and its gradual pacing demand a fairly sophisticated reader, especially for the massive twist at the end (the narrator and protagonist is the twin that readers have been led to believe was the fatality, not the survivor) that's conveyed largely by easily misreadable implication. Young readers may therefore decode the ending as a new psychological twist rather than a revelation about what they've just experienced, but they'll feel for the bereaved hero and his struggle to make a whole life when he's lost what feels like half of himself.