Nathan Penlington's "The Boy In The Book"

“The Boy In The Book” starts with the charming premise of finding a secret in a book. The author, Nathan, having ordered the complete collection of “Choose Your Own Adventure” series off eBay, notices that the commentary of a young boy has been scrawled in the margins. Sandwiched in the story, Hyperspace, are four pages from a diary, alluding to suicide, drugs, and guns.

Nathan has an obsessive personality, and it is this in part that leads him to set out on a journey to find the previous owner of the book, who, judging from years in the diary, must be a similar age to himself.

Before directly heading out to find the man (but after trying to Facebook stalk him), we met with a number of professionals, including a graphologist who analyses the young boy’s writing, a historian who collects diaries, and a child psychologist.

During this adventure, Nathan starts to realise that his interest in finding the boy in the book is not only out of concern and curiousity (did he go through with the plan to end his own life?), but also because of the striking similarities between the boy and his own childhood self. Quite often outsiders, the boys both kept lists of things to better about themselves (such as posture, and reading).

In the epilogue, it is revealed that all along the journey was as much for a television programme as it was a personal quest, as they were filming a documentary on “Choose Your Own Adventure”.  One character in the story represented three real-life men, a camera was there for most of the scenes, and some events had been reported out of order.

Unfortunately, this revelation changed the whole context of the story for me, and left me feeling deceived and rather sour. While it is still quite definitely a work of non-fiction, finding that scenes are changed for the sake of story and continuity changes the validity of the story as a whole.

I would still recommend this work, but with a slight sense of hesitation. I think finding the edited nature of the story after the book, not before, is what caused this sudden prejudice against the work, and it would have been better knowing the facts going in.

Overall, it is still a fun, nicely paced personal story of two boys, separated by distance and time, who managed to redeem an odd kind of friendship.