Amazon.com Review
Chris Lynch has long been one of the most stylistically daring of teen novelists, and in
Freewill, his innovative use of language redefines the possibilities of the genre. Strikingly, the story is told in second person. The voice is in the mind of Will, a boy who is moving in stunned bewilderment through a life leeched of meaning by the death of his father and stepmother in what may have been a suicide and murder. This speaker (who is not Will) constantly admonishes, challenges, and questions reality in clipped, enigmatic sentence fragments, and Will only occasionally answers back. The events of the story are dimly seen through this distorting haze of interior dialogue (as the events of Lynch's
Gold Dust were seen through the protagonist's obsession with baseball).
Will, in a therapeutic woodworking class at "Hopeless High," has moved beyond furniture and garden gnomes to strange pole sculptures. There he is disconnected from reality and other people, except for occasional brief encounters with a tall black runner named Angela, who remains sarcastic and deliberately distant. When a girl from the school drowns in what is perhaps a suicide, a floral tribute accumulates around the death spot, with one of Will's sculptures as the centerpiece. A second possible suicide, and then two more are all marked with the strange poles, and a cult begins to grow around Will as the "carrier pigeon of death." A reporter forces him to see the connection between the sculptures and his father's ambivalent end, and Will begins to sink into total oblivion, saved, finally, when Angela and his grandparents reach out in "freewill," in this very dark, very odd, but riveting novel. (Ages 14 and older) --Patty Campbell
From Publishers Weekly
Despite the redemptive themes suggested by its title and its division into three sections expansively entitled "Faith," "Hope" and "Charity," Lynch's (Whitechurch) latest novel focuses on the dark and murky corners of its main character's psyche. Unraveling as an interior monologue in which 17-year-old Will refers to himself as "you," the narrative cryptically sets forth this teen's plight. Against his will, the tellingly named protagonist has been enrolled in a woodworking program at some kind of vocational high school populated with lost souls. He lives with his grandparents because, as the boy discloses midway through the story, "My dad drove off the road.... Into the water. With my stepmother." Water plays a chilling role in the morbid goings-on, which include the mysterious drownings or suicides of several teens; with each death, one of Will's wood sculptures is found near the site. Will says he is responsible, but is he indeed a murderer or even a "carrier pigeon of death"? Clarification comes slowly and obtrusively via advice from Will's grandfather and encounters with two of Will's troubled classmates, all of whom fit familiar stereotypes. Filled with such self-addressed comments as "She doesn't understand you. Nobody understands you," this airless novel does not reward the effort required to penetrate it. Ages 12-up.
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