The Boy in the Burning House

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Readers first met Jim Hawkins as a character in “The Bermuda
Triangle,” one of the short stories in Tim Wynne-Jones’s collection
The Lord of the Fries and Other Stories (1999). Now, about a year later,
Jim, 14, continues to deal with the reality that his father, Hub,
remains missing and is assumed dead, likely a suicide. Financially
strapped, Jim and his mother, Iris, could lose their Ontario family
farm, but their situation brightens when Father Fisher, a local pastor,
indicates his church might provide a low-interest loan. What initially
seems to be just another “realistic family story” suddenly becomes
an intense murder mystery when Ruth Rose, Father Fisher’s adopted
daughter, seeks out Jim and claims that her “father” killed Hub. For
a variety of reasons, including Father Fisher’s fine reputation and
the fact that the locals consider Ruth Rose to be mentally unstable, Jim
initially disbelieves the bizarre girl. However, the few clues that Ruth
Rose provides lead Jim to a 25-year-old New Year’s Eve incident in
which a young man burned to death in an abandoned house. Most
disquieting for Jim is the real possibility that his father, just an
adolescent in 1972, may have been actively involved in that death.

The plot in this novel is such a “grabber” that readers should be
encouraged to read the book twice. Engaged by the book’s characters
and swept along by the twists and turns of the story during a first
reading, most adolescents will simply be unaware of the incredible
sensory richness of Wynne-Jones’s language. Highly recommended.