Pitched as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time meets Life of Pi and coming with a pledge that 30% of the royalties from the book would go to UK mental health charities, this debut novel by a ghost and copy writer, was worth a punt. I gather it will become a film in 2025 called ‘Spiked!’
Brio McPride of the title is a troubled teen, betrayed by his best friend and love of his life Izzy, who prefers the bully Darcy now at school, his Irish mum gone, being looked after by Pippa, who has to be busy minding her shop. Brio believes his father ran away to the French Foreign Legion; everyone else believes something different. A succession of psychiatrists and psychologists try to get to the bottom of his confused mind and outbursts; his strict Catholic school and his ingrained relationship with God adding to the mix. After Darcy goads him just one step too far, always making out that Brio is gay, the authorities want to take him into care – but along comes Logie, a rather different kind of psychotherapist.
The thing that Brio used to enjoy the most was writing stories with Izzy. Logie practises a kind of ‘narrative hypnotherapy’ which will encourage Brio to write out his neuroses, gain equilibrium, and if the writing’s good, he might even win back Izzy. However, Logie works for a big-data giant ‘that’ll stop at nothing to win approval for its AI-driven mental health platform.’
Sadly, I didn’t get that far in the book, giving up after 128 of its 431 pages. Although the novel is being marketed as an adult read, it felt very YA to me, and in particular the story that Brio writes – he is a teen after all – is a middle-grade to YA fantasy involving a ‘Hoggit’ – a hedgehog-like creature that came into his imagination and took over. The adventures of the Hoggit spill out into pages and pages and pages of narrative, all bound up in mytho-religious stuff, and I lost interest. Really, I should have seen the hedgehog on the cover and been forewarned that it might go this way. However, outside Brio’s writing, there is a complex novel in which the reader is probably (deliberately) as confused as Brio at the beginning, which needed some concentration to get into.
Despite the important issues it covers, this novel wasn’t for me. I wish it well, and a big thank you to Debbie at Cameron PR for sending it to me with the super church candle too!
Aventus paperback original, Dec 2024. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link (free UK P&P)
