Carry Me Down

Like many adolescents, 11-year-old John Egan is at war: with his hormone-charged body, with cruel schoolyard tormentors, with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. Unlike most adolescents, the naive native of Gorey, Ireland, has funneled his frustrations into a ”gift” for detecting lies, with which he hopes to enter the Guinness Book of World Records. In taut, simple prose, M.J. Hyland meticulously captures the specific pains of growing up poor and lonely in Ireland and deftly anatomizes her judgmental protagonist’s odd mixture of ”little boy and grown lad.” For all her care in describing John’s increasingly explosive behavior in Carry Me Down, however, Hyland fails to instill him and his family with enough empathy for us to be invested in their fates.