Book Review: The Thing With Finn

Ten-year-old Danny has run away. It’s best for everyone. Everything has been strange and hard at home since ‘the thing with Finn’ – which the astute reader will realise very quickly is the death of his twin brother, even though the circumstances surrounding this event are kept from us until the very end of the novel. When your identical twin has died and people are still asking, thoughtlessly, which one you are, it stings. So Danny needs to escape, eventually ending up on an island with someone who’s gone through his own loss.

Despite the tough subject matter, this is also laced with humour and lots of toilet jokes (there is apparently a rule that books with boys in them must have these). At times some of the reflections feel a little too profound, nudging this towards a book for readers slightly older than the characters.

“Now that I think about it I sort of know why people are always running around all over the place all the time. I think they’re trying to run away from being background scared. It’s as if running away from it is a kind of pretending it isn’t there, that it isn’t chasing you.

It starts as soon as you know people don’t last.”

Cheerful stuff, indeed. Danny is a heartbreaking character you can’t help but root for, and wish so desperately he didn’t have to hurt so much.