It's not a bad book, but it never really grabbed me. It seemed a bit self-consciously quirky, without being really imaginative. ( )

Dana Adam Shapiro's The Every Boy cannot be considered a typical coming-of-age story, since the protagonist Henry Every is dead when the book begins. Instead, Henry's story is told through excerpts from his 2600-page ledger. The ledger entries interspersed with vignettes of Henry's life introduce the reader to this quirky, precocious, unique character.

The plot itself is weak and meandering, fractured both by the non-linear method of storytelling and the strong focus on characters. This focus, though, is just as well, because most of the situations that Henry finds himself faced with are flat-out absurd. His mother leaves the family to raise weaver ants in the Netherlands. His father has devoted an entire room in their house to a "massive saltwater aquarium for lethal breeds of jellyfish." His best friend Jorden teaches him how to break into houses – but just to look, never to steal. And his kind-of girlfriend Benna, born without a right hand, takes him to a party for voluntary amputees. Henry once told Jorden that he is looking to become "something smaller, something other," but his diligence taken with the ledger and his desire for knowledge suggest that he actually craves meaning, not more absurdity.

But Henry's escapades should be taken merely as a backdrop to showcase the characters themselves, the engaging personalities and connections which Shapiro crafts. The relationship between Henry and Jorden is one of the novel's high points. Jorden is Henry's sounding board, an aspiring psychoanalyst brimming with medical knowledge and an assortment of arcane facts. Their quick back-and-forth conversations ("Who kills themselves more, boys or girls?" – "Boys" – "You know that for a fact?" – "Girls try more, but boys are better at it") sound sincere, not the witty banter to which Shapiro could have stooped. And sometimes the mundane or the non-sequiturs ("Twenty years from now, we could still eat meals together, right? You and me, no matter what?" – "We could watch baseball while we eat.") are as much about what is not said as what is. The interactions between Henry and Jorden do not seem contrived or overly sentimental, and they lend an understated sweetness to the book.

As Tolstoy observed in Anna Karenina, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way; and every relationship in this book is dysfunctional in its own way. Each is tangled in deception or miscommunication: between Henry's parents, Henry and Benna, Jorden and her father, Henry and his father. Functional relationships are few and far between. This may be a reflection of one of the book's themes: nothing ever exactly makes sense or works out, but everyone just does the best that they know how to.

But the plot itself is unimpressive. At the end, the reader is left with an unsatisfied feeling of "So what?" It was not critical for any plot to be resolved, the characters have changed but not in an especially overt way, and Henry does not even get to grow up like a proper bildungsroman. If anything, this is an anti-coming-of-age story, in which nothing in life really matters and efforts to conform, or even to understand, all amount to little. ( )

It was pure luck, or fate if you will, that made me buy The Every Boy. The book is the lyrical account of a 15-year-old boy's life after he dies. And even though that in itself is enough to turn many readers away, this is a beautiful, moving book which most likely will feel more like a feel-good novel in the end than anything else. Great debut for Shapiro and leaves me asking for more. ( )

I thought I would like this book alot more than I actually did. It was good and insightful. I just felt let down a little. Had a nice touch of Irony in the end that I liked though. ( )