Grover

A ten-year-old boy adjusts to the changes in his life after his mother dies. Like absently, compulsively poking a sore, the reverberations of a death in the family, significantly a suicide, emerge among cameos of small town and small fry life in Thicket; it's a fragmentary, almost furtive sort of story that readers have to fill out for themselves. And very much Grover's Story, his buddy Ellen Grae (no Lady though fairly constrained) figuring chiefly as ballast. The possibilities are apparent: however few the words for his mother's wistful withdrawal, his father's brusque estrangement, and Grover's aching response to both, they're the right words. To explain their secrecy about his mother's illness, Aunt Mary and Uncle Ab intone "We didn't want you to worry. Wasn't that nice of us?" Most disturbing, afterwards, is his father's breakdown (he "shouldn't cry that way in front of me. . . . I don't cry in front of him") and his insistence that "it's the chief duty of every human being to endure life." Which arises from feeling abandoned, Grover realizes, along with recognition that his mother "would have changed" and sought to avert it. Grover's own dark passage involves the brutal slaying of a cock turkey. . . but there are lighter moments (his father blindly calls him "impervious") like his determination to teach the alphabet to unflappable housekeeper Rose. Plus excursions with Ellen Grae and dogged little Farrell that are at once funny and barometric--assuming, as one must throughout, that a reader knows how to gauge them.