The Quiet Boy

“The nice thing about something that can never be known is that you, yourself, get to decide. There is no such thing as what we know for sure—there are only manifestations, impressions, and the meanings we choose to assign to them.”

Disclaimer: Thank you to Mulholland Books and Goodreads for the book giveaway and providing a free copy of the book. This review contains my honest thoughts and reflects only my reading experience.Despite my legal interests, I rarely read legal thrillers, so it was with slight hesitation that I initially decided to read this one. I’m not sure why it is—maybe I just doubt that they will hit the mark? The author, Ben H. Winters, has a brother who is a lawyer, and used several types of consultants and beta readers for this work, so I am blindly trusting his interpretation of the law (though there were some weird bits where I had to look things up to double check). But don’t let this talk of legal thrillers excite you or bore you away just yet—this book is really a lot more than that, with the legal and medical thriller aspect being a mere hook that reels you in. (Also I’m trying to keep this review spoiler-free, so apologies in advance for the vague hand-waving of plot points/themes/etc. that will occur.)As other reviews have said, this book sort of transcends genres. A lot of involves courtroom scenes and legal preparation or discovery/investigative work, so you wouldn’t be wrong to say this is primarily a legal thriller. Another element is the young high school boy, Wesley Keener, and his mysterious illness—so in a way, this is a medical mystery story as well. Then there are the cultists, the supernatural hints, and deeply personal introspection on various themes (more on that later). Since it’s hard to pin this book down, I’m not sure I could holistically examine it as a legal thriller alone. If I did, I would leave the book a bit disappointed, since the legal backdrop ends up being just that as other parts of the story come to the forefront.The plot of this book is split into two different timelines, 2008–2010 and 2019. The first part of the narrative deals with the accident itself, where high schooler Wesley Keener hits his head, requires emergency brain surgery, and suddenly becomes ‘frozen in time’—which in this story means that he paces around a room and does not show any signs of awareness nor aging (growing, eating, pooping, etc.). The first protagonist we meet is Jay Shenk, a somewhat rogue-like attorney who tries to help the Keeners sue the hospital for performing the surgery. The second part focuses on Ruben Shenk, Jay’s son, as the protagonist, who tries to do some detective work to discover why the boy’s father, Richard, has killed Theresa Pileggi, a neuroscientist expert who had testified in the first case. While at first the dual timelines kept the suspense going, as the book went on, it made the plot feel contrived and difficult to hold onto. Despite that, I ended up growing to enjoy both Jay and Ruben’s perspectives as I kept reading. But you never get to stay with one perspective too long, and the shifty nature of the narrative left me wanting a bit more in terms of both plot and character development.Speaking of characters, though the characters in the book were memorable, again, I was really hoping for a bit more on the development or even backstory aspect. We do get snatches of background and snatches of what may be development, but most of the characters are pretty indistinguishable between timelines. The book immediately starts off in 2019 with Ruben’s perspective, where you learn that he is estranged from his father; this has potential to be an interesting character dynamic, but it is never given room to properly breathe in the context of the story. Oh, and did you know Ruben is both Asian and Jewish? Sure, this is an uncommon pairing of identities, but the author deigned this fact important enough to mention several times in quick succession—it was weird. The side characters were decent enough but mostly forgetful outside of their minor roles. Dr. Pileggi was an interesting character, but much of her motivation and actions happen off-page, so as the reader I felt no strong sentiments about her. And this is not a super relevant point, but I also found the name ‘Shenk’ to be a little off-putting every time I read it. I am not sure why, it just felt like an uncanny valley type of name.According to the author, this book is about being a parent. Family, found and biological, and the nature of loving (or hating) family all is a driving theme for much of the book’s characters. For instance, we get the really sweet relationship between young Ruben (who is adopted) who wants to be just like his father, and then we get the growing tenderness between father and daughter in the Keener family after suffering a great tragedy. Of course, Wesley’s mother is the archetypal concerned mother character, never once turning her mind away from helping Wesley. There are also some attempts at deeper, philosophical themes as hinted at by the cultists and supernatural subplot, but overall its significance in the overarching story ended up being less than I had expected. Still, the nature of the relationships between family members and the characters’ motivations serve the plot well.There are some odd moments in the book and even outside of it. For instance, the publisher’s blurb calls Jay Shenk an ‘acclaimed PI’ even though he is supposed to be a small time personal injury lawyer; and the blurb also calls Wesley’s father ‘David’, even though in the copy I got, his name is ‘Richard’. I can only assume that this is a pre-publication blurb that somehow found its way onto the Goodreads page. There are also weird instances of male-perspective where Jay and Ruben comment on women’s appearances that felt unnecessary in the story, but perhaps that is just how this author writes. (I have not read a Ben H. Winters novel before this.) At one point Ruben misremembers something that happened in high school as happening in middle school, and even more egregiously, at one point a character named Paolo is referred to as ‘Paola’ in the text! Now I’m no editor, but if I could spot this many errors in a published book, please just give me your job already, thanks. You know where to reach me.In spite of the issues, or perhaps because of them, this was a fairly quick and easy read to get through. The mystery and resolution of the legal aspects were my main interests in the book, but I felt that the legal elements were subsumed by the author’s attempt to drive forward the supernatural and suspense aspects a bit more towards the end. A better balance of genres would have kept the story balanced and equally weighted from beginning to end. And it’s not that I didn’t like the supernatural or other genraic attempts—they just felt a little out of place. There is a somewhat satisfying ending that I did not anticipate and the characters were endearing enough for me, so this ended up being a solidly decent read. While I am not racing to read another Ben. H. Winters book, I won’t discount it either.

If the name "Ben Winters" is on the cover, you know you're in for an unusual, inventive trip. In this case, the story revolves around an ambulance-chasing attorney who takes on a case that ends up swallowing his life and that of his adoptive son, who is something of a (very) junior partner in the law firm. returnreturnThe victim: a teen who suffers a head injury, and after emergency surgery, has an unexpected outcome: he doesn't sleep or eat or grow or experience anything human, but simply walks in circles, endlessly. A living boy has been turned into an unthinking golem, and the colorful lawyer is on the hunt for a way to pin the blame on the hospital - though in fact nobody can explain what happened or what caused it. And then, as things grow more desperate, he takes on a murder case, his client the boy's father, with zero criminal law experience. In the meanwhile, a spooky zealot of a man who believes the strangely affected teenager holds the secret of a utopian future, haunts the lawyer's son and the peculiar expert witness who thinks she can explain what happened. returnreturnCompared to earlier novels replete with fully-developed and often bizarre world-building and high concept inventiveness, The Quiet Boy is a bit unbalanced. The case of the boy who walks in circles isn't all that compelling, and the cult=like fanatic who thinks he will usher in peace and enlightenment is spooky, but all of it seems a bit thin next to the endearing and well-developed father-son relationship and the case that dominates their lives. It's as if the novel is a combination of a realistic character-driven legal thriller and one very odd interruption in that reality that is strikingly strange but ends up being somewhat of a MacGuffin. The center of gravity is in the family relationships, not in the boy who has been reduced to a mindless circling figure. I wish there had been more made of the quiet boy himself--it seemed oddly undeveloped--but I certainly enjoyed spending time with the colorful lawyer, his son, and the people who are drawn into their hopeless case.