Customer Reviews

The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An imaginitive story about a little boy who literally falls into a coma and the doctor who tries to save him from himself and his dysfunctional family. This book is so hard to put down and is such an easy read! The character's are compelling and even the "bad guy" characters have a dimension to them which allows you to empathise with their position. This is a psychological thriller that twists and turns during the entire story, leaving you guessing as to whom the culprit is and what really happened to little Louis Drax, the "Amazing Accident Prone Boy".

Cross the eerie,'the Sixth Sense' with the stream of conscious narrative of, 'The Curious Incident of the Dog At Night time', and you'l have entered Louis Drax's world. A nine year old boy lies in a coma after a terrible fall. His mother is the only witness to the incident which she blames on her husband, claiming he pushed their son. Problem is, the husband has vanished, and the only other person who can tell what happened is buried deep in the catacombs of his mind. The book is wonderfully suspenseful with gothic overtones, and enough tension and human drama you'll want to finish in one or two sittings. I also appreciated that for the most part it kept me guessing up until the very end.

Louis Drax calls himself the amazing accident-prone boy. He is a precocious, emotionally disturbed French nine-year-old who is oddly different from other children. He has been a victim of frequent life-threatening accidents since the complications of his birth. His Maman warns him that he is using up his nine lives faster than a cat, and she is frantic to protect him. But on his ninth birthday, while on a picnic with his parents, he falls off a cliff and his Papa vanishes without a trace. Maman claims that Papa pushed Louis off the cliff and has gone into hiding. Although pronounced dead, Louis somehow begins breathing again, but is in a deep comatose state. He is transferred to Dr. Pascal Dannachet's coma clinic while the police search for Papa.

The story is narrated alternately by Louis within his coma and by Dr. Dannachet. In a disturbing and eerily askew voice that calls to mind Christopher Boone from "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," Louis tells his life story to a mysterious bandaged man who lives in his head. Through the voice of the doctor, who becomes obsessed with Maman and talks with the police, the reader is presented with different perspectives on the severely dysfunctional Drax family and Louis's near-fatal accident. As the two narrative voices converge, the truth of Louis's past slowly emerges.

I found the book unsettling, haunting, and full of constantly shifting truths. Yet I also found it riveting, freshly original, and full of twists and surprises. Louis is presented in a quirky and endearing fashion, and his narrative mixes humor with angst. In spite of the darkness, there is a thread of hope. Once I understood all the facts of his life, I felt like rereading the beginning of the story to give his words their proper interpretation. This is not an easy read, but it is a rewarding one.

Eileen Rieback

Although a relatively small book, and one that will compel you to finish it once you open the cover, this book is not an easy read. Oh you'll fly through the pages easily enough, but the story of young accident-prone Louis Drax is not a happy one.

This dark psychological thriller may be unsettling to some, particularly if you are a protective mother of an only child, and you may find yourself trying on the shoes of Natalie Drax, said shoes being pretty uncomfortable to live in.

Few readers can escape unmoved when being told of a child who has escaped death eight times in eight years, only to fall off a cliff on his ninth birthday, under suspicious circumstances, to his apparent death.

Miraculously, Louis lives to fight another day, but this time he's in a coma, in a special clinic, "talking" to us through an imaginary and gruesome companion. Always a difficult and precocious child, the comatose Louis still manages to stir up trouble for not only his mother, but also his doctor and one-time psychiatrist, and the police find themselves dealing with something quite out of the ordinary.

Certain conclusions can be drawn quite early in the book, but do not detract from the clever story telling. This one grabs your attention and holds it until you reluctantly turn the final page.


Amanda Richards, November 13, 2005

This is a great book- it has a dynamic plot, fascinating characters, an intriguing mystery, and excellent characterization by Liz Jensen. Although it's similar to the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, this book is more of a mystery and has two narrators, the precocious but highly disturbed youngster Louis Drax, who narrates while in a coma, and his doctor, Pascal Dannachet, who desperately tries to understand the events that led to Louis falling off a cliff and into a coma. I found the ending to be fair and I look forward to rereading the book again to see how well it holds up and if I can catch clues which I may have missed before. Although highly recommended, there are a few minor mistakes in the text, and one scene in which a character is referred to by the wrong name! However, this does not reflect on the quality of this enjoyable and ambitious book, and I can't help but think that this book would make a fine movie, if handled appropriately. Highly recommended!

When I opened this book, the first thing I thought was "Oh no, not another precocious young narrator!" I had recently read "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time," so the smart-and-perceptive-little-boy gimmick felt a bit old. However, gimmick or not, the author manipulates both the cutting intuitions and the wide-eyed fragility of little Louis to wonderful effect. The suspense in this novel is centered around two basic premises--that Louis has mysteriously picked up on, but then completely detached himself from, certain emotionally traumatic experiences in his family's past--and Jensen's Louis very convincingly plays both sides of this equation.

Three characters--Louis' troubled parents and a high-minded but overly Romantic doctor--try alternately to save and destroy him, the reader never knowing which is sincere and which simply a hypocrite. The psychology of all three, like Louis', is elaborate and glorious: they are three-, even four-dimensional, realistically complicated to the extent that it seems Jensen must know them personally--they can't exist only on paper.

Aside from her convoluted and fascinating characters, Jensen's work is good, but not outstanding; the Gothic tone of the novel adds to its suspense, but the plot is a little wild to be believable, and nothing real--aside from dirty secrets--is illuminated or resolved. The characters are all in a worse mess than when they started. It is her idiosyncratic and self-involved characters that make this book worth a read.

I picked this up at work (I'm a librarian) and didn't expect to like it. The storytelling method hooked me more than the initial story, but I soon needed to know and understand what had happened to Louis to place him this precarious position. The characters are multidimensional, and the plot (though somewhat predictable) moved well given the mutiple narrators. I was left with a feeling of hope and redemption, and a curiosity about the characters' continuing lives.

Louis Drax is a nine year old French boy, definitely a difficult child, and prone to horrible life-threatening accidents, at least once a year. This year his estranged parents take him on a family picnic, but guess what--he has an accident and falls to his death. Or near death--because to everyone's surprise, he starts breathing again (remaining in a deep coma).

Dr. Pascal Dannachet is a somewhat troubled middle-aged man with marital problems who works in a coma clinic. Occasionally his patients recover. His methods, of course, are a bit unorthodox.

Natalie Drax is Louis' overprotective mother--a beautiful, seemingly vulnerable waif who has a strangely powerful effect on men. Often to their downfall.

Well, the plot brings these three and other interesting characters together to reveal some strange discoveries about each other and the mysteries of life. I won't tell you what happens of course. You'll have to read it for itself.

Author Liz Jensen writes beautiful, evocative prose. She creates such a powerful French atmosphere for her story that I had to look and make sure this wasn't a translation. In the beginning I found the little boy, Louis, oddly appealing in his insights--something like a very dysfunctional version of Adrian Mole. However the charm dissipates as the plot grows more absurd and unbelievable. This was not an easy book to finish. The suspension of disbelief simply couldn't be sustained--for me--enough for the story to work. I can recommend it with reservations. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

The accident prone boy Louis Drax falls into a coma on his 9th birthday, and the ensuing events entangle his mother with doctors and the law. The characters are original, the dialogue sharp and sometimes darkly comic. The author's focus on the world outlook of the child reminds me a bit of that used in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" and "The Way the Crow Flies," both of which I found equally compelling. Liz Jensen, a Brit who has written other novels, deserves to be read!

I picked this book up for 2 euro in a bargin bin & boy did I get value for money!! I was hooked on the character of Louis Drax from the start, one part of me wanted to race through to the last page to see how it ends & the other wanted to savour every page & wish it wouldnt end. A truly entertaing book.