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THE PAPER BOY by Jacqueline J. Edgington

THE PAPER BOY

by Jacqueline J. Edgington

Pub Date: March 25th, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9980338-2-2
Publisher: Self

In Edgington’s sequel novel, a high-achieving schoolboy submits a short story for an assignment, and the grade that he receives comes back to haunt him.

Fifteen-year-old Jack Hankins is used to being at the top of the class, so when he receives an F for a creative-writing assignment, breaking his run of A’s, he’s more than a little confused. The nine-line story that he submitted presented a brief scene of a boy running away from an unnamed person. In real life, Jack was adopted by a wealthy, caring family, and he seems like the last person who would flee his good life. Soon, the shocking grade begins to materialize in all corners of his life. For example, during an art class, he finds, to his horror, that he’s unwittingly covered his canvas with large red F’s, and it begins to seem like he’s suffering from mental illness. Then his friends and family are drawn into a series of increasingly peculiar occurrences; at one point, for example, red F’s appear in a video game that his good friend Ishvara is playing. It soon becomes obvious that something is fundamentally disrupting the nature of reality itself. Edgington’s debut novel, Happy Jack (2018), was concerned with Jack’s spiritual and emotional awakening as a child, and it was aimed at a younger audience. This time around, Jack is older, and the narrative has matured with him, transitioning from innocence to experience in a way not dissimilar to that in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In this second novel, Happy Jack itself becomes a book within a book, taking the form of a sacred text that Jack needs to track down in order to understand his own identity. It’s an intriguing experiment that considers the roles of the character, the author, and fiction itself, and the narrative drifts between fantasy, bildungsroman, and surrealism in an ultimately accessible way.

An unpredictable story about childhood, fate, and fiction, written with warmth and a light touch.