There are some resonant moments, as when the Cartographer smashes ECT equipment that he had witnessed being used on another child (‘I had never broken anything electrical with an axe before and I loved the glassy, squeaky screams it made’). Overall, though, the prose is too loose, too preoccupied with the narrator’s voice. To be sure, writing in the voice of a child is a difficult, thankless task. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (the initial murder scene owes much to the riverboat scene of Huck Finn) and To Kill a Mockingbird are rare examples of success. The child is by turns too innocent and too knowing. Children are as rawly intelligent as adults, they just know less. First-time author Twohig seems to forget this. Poignant flashbacks to the dead twin Tom are the only scenes in which the reader is granted another perspective. Here we see the child away from his fantasy world struggling to shut out crushing grief. This is Twohig at his best. But by the time the understated, serendipitous ending arrives, the reader has been enervated by the inconsistent verisimilitude.