THE FALL

Years after high school, Mog remembers his brief time with a now-dead friend in this British import.

After a phone call alerting him to Chris’ death, Mog looks back on his time as a 13-year-old at violent, cruel Corpus Christi High School. There was vicious bullying from teachers as well as students, and Mog wanted only to keep his head down and avoid being a target. It’s unclear why Chris even befriended Mog and his group; wasn’t he too cool for them? But he did, and they had fun—as much as anyone could have fun in that grim, run-down place—telling jokes, shoplifting, giving what they’d stolen to girls or tossing the items into the polluted stream by the school. In this brief, spare novella, Mog details his jealousy and eventual cruelty when Chris added Duffy, the boy everyone victimized or ignored, to their circle. Carnegie Medal winner McGowan’s minimalist prose becomes lyrically lovely in a moment of viscerally brutal animal cruelty. The narrator has no answers as to why he made the choices he did, but there’s enough in the bare-bones vignettes for readers to speculate. Although some of the language is Americanized, the text’s Britishness adds to the sense of place without detracting from its appeal to striving readers. In King’s occasional stark, atmospheric, grayscale illustrations, the characters largely present white.

This spare, powerful, and unsentimental remembrance of a bleak youth is an accessible yet emotionally challenging text.