What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
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Davy's talent
SOLVED: Children's/YA
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SOLVED. Boy with some form of psychic ability; keeps seeing black squiggles moving against a tan or fawn background, which he later ends up drawing; ultimately kidnapped by a mentally ill man who is the source of the images. Possibly British. [s]
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Yes it is! Thank you! Had you read it yourself, or were you able to do a keyword search? Thank goodness for Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" feature, because once you gave me the title and the author I was able to find this:One morning in Art Mr. Locke showed Davy's class a lot of reproductions of abstracts by well-known painters and then told them to go and do likewise. The only rule was that there mustn't be anything in any of the pictures that could be recognized as a picture of something. Davy hated this sort of artwork. He was fairly good at drawing animals and houses and trees, though not so good with people; but he was hopeless if he didn't have something to work from. However, he found a sheet of fawny yellow paper in the rack, pinned it to his board, and with the side of a stick of charcoal scraped a furry darkness around the edges. Then he used the tip of the charcoal to dash a whirling squiggle into the middle of the sheet. And another. And another . . .
[...] Davy moved away and looked at what he had done. It was not as bad as the real thing because the squiggles didn't dart about, but they looked as though they might.
"It's called Fury," he said. "It's really a . . . a dream I once had - a sort of nightmare. The paper reminded me. I thought if I painted it, it might help . . ."
"Uh," said Mr. Locke, seeming to understand. "Don't take it off the board till you've fixed it or that charcoal will rub. I'll, uh, put it in one of the frames."
He did so, and hung it in the passage to Assembly, so that Davy had to pass it several times a day. He couldn't bear to look at it. The other children hardly noticed it, of course, but several of the teachers said it was disgusting and asked to have it moved. This only made Mr. Locke like it even more, so that Davy (who usually only got "Shows interest and tries hard" on his art reports) won a prize with it at the end of term.
I see that it was also released under the title Davy's Talent at one point. I don't know if I read it by that title or as The Gift.
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He also wrote Eva, about a girl who is in a traumatic accident and whose brain is transplanted into a gorilla. Now I want to read everything by this man!Solved:
The Gift by Peter Dickinson.
I had read this under the title The Gift way back in the day, so your description sounded very familiar to me, especially the bit about the "squiggles." I couldn't remember all the details, but when I searched Novelist for "squiggles" the title came up and the reviews/descriptions sounded close to yours, so I figured it was a good possibility (despite my own poor memory). :)
I could *swear* that I had looked for squiggles on Novelist (and elsewhere) as well. Well, thank you hugely again. 8)
A boy with some form of telepathy or ESP (although I don't know if those terms are actually used in the story) has this recurring image of black squiggles moving against a tan or fawn-colored background. They disturb him a great deal. At one point, when there is some kind of art class or art competition at his school, he finds tan or fawn-colored paper and draws black squiggles against it like the ones he keeps seeing. His teacher or some other adult likes the image and finds it very intense, but other students are disturbed by it. It ends up winning some kind of a prize at the school, although I don't think the boy is happy about this: I think, from his perspective, when he drew it he was trying to exorcise the image from his mind, but seeing it win accolades doesn't really help.
Later in the book, the boy is kidnapped by a man who is the source of the images that the boy has been seeing. The man is mentally ill and periodically sees these images, which he calls either worms or maggots - I can't remember which. This might be why he kidnaps the boy: because he sees the boy's artwork somehow and thinks that he can see the images too. However, in the context of the story, it is really the man who is the source of the images - the boy just sees them because he has been picking them up from the man's mind. Although the boy is afraid of his kidnapper and remains frightened of him, he comes to pity him (perhaps the man had been abused at some point?) However, despite the boy's efforts, I think that the man is either killed by law enforcement who come to rescue the boy or dies in some other way.
The boy is rescued at the end and his family, who maybe didn't believe that he had these powers or were at odds with him in some other way, are reconciled with him.