Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1016440 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 528 pages

Synopsis
Everything seems to be going well for the Fletchers, a Mormon family that has recently moved to a small North Carolina town, but trouble begins when seven-year-old Stevie begins to withdraw into his own world.

Customer Reviews

Good but not *as* good as Card's other books
I actually like Card's dark fantasy, but I think *Treasure Box* and *Homebody* are better written. He writes original twists to the ghost-story idea, but the pacing ruined this book for me. I read it, I was gripped for the length of the book, but I think he can do so much better.

The extraneous stuff is quite interesting, although knowing that Card and the main character are both Mormons tended to give me less suspension-of-disbelief than usual: with Ender and Alvin Card is creating a world, a myth, but with this book I don't get that feeling.

The serial-killer stuff seems to be too forced and extrinsic: for example, the prologue is in-the-head of the villain (like the sub-genre of crime novels where every alternate chapter is villain-POV), but the villain hardly comes into this story at all, and the 'stories' of the parents all seem to be about something else. Not that this *should* be that particular serial-killer subgenre, but tacking on that prologue and then making the contents of the villain's mind invisible for the rest of the book is a peculiar trick on this reader's expectations.

The saintly-little-boy-with-psychic-powers doesn't really work for me, and although I quite liked the straightforward day-to-day stuff about the dad (hero or at least main-viewpoint) being trapped in a job from hell, I don't think it tied together with the serial-killer plot at all. Some way into the last chapter I was distracted by wondering how Card was going to pull the thing together, and when he did, I felt slightly cheated.

Card is a good writer, he obviously *can* pace and plot his books by this stage in his career. Why hasn't he done it here?