Horn Book

In a Hackensack police interrogation room, sixteen-year-old Bruno Victor Benucci III is being interviewed as a witness to a murder. We learn, via Vic’s first-person narration including flashbacks, about his rare neurological disorder, Moebius syndrome, which causes facial paralysis; about his grief over his deceased father; and about his “heart-thinker” personality, which makes his inability to conventionally express emotions feel more devastating. In a separate interrogation room is second narrator Madeline (Mad) Falco, a headstrong, almost-eighteen-year-old orphan whose abusive uncle was the murder victim. Mad runs with a crew that includes Congolese-refugee brothers Baz, a fatherly twenty-seven-year-old who turned himself in for the murder, and twenty-year-old Zuz, who is selectively mute; and eleven-year-old Coco, a connoisseur of sass, rap, and “faux cussing” (“What the motherfrakking frak . . . ?”). Early in Vic’s tale, the quartet welcomes him in with open arms after he runs away from his mother and her despised new fiancé with his father’s urn, looking to scatter Dad’s ashes per his instructions—a mission that lends structure to much of his story. Arnold’s (Mosquitoland, rev. 3/15) prose is sharp and observant, his pacing restrained, revealing each character’s backstory gradually while also setting up a murder investigation that keeps readers guessing until the second it doesn’t. Vic constantly refers to life revelations from his father, including the idea of “simultaneous extreme opposites”—a concept that, given all the laugh-cries to be had in his emotionally well-wrought novel, Arnold motherfrakking nails. katrina hedeen