Hide and Seek

Publishers Weekly

This taut, suspenseful debut novel narrated by a young boy takes as its premise the unthinkable and its aftermath: the disappearance of a child during a school field trip. Harry Pickles, a bright English lad "aged nine and a bit," is snuggly ensconced in a comfy bourgeois-bohemian family until his four-year-old brother, Daniel, vanishes at a rest stop. "You are a boy. A kind boy. A clever boy.... It's not your job to be responsible for other people's lives," the nice cop says, but Harry becomes consumed by survivor's guilt. As for the Pickles family, "life dragged on." But Sambrook tenderly documents a grieving process that fluctuates between the predictable and the bizarre: Harry gives himself a Christmas present of "not feeling sad," but hears a plaintive echo of "You are not enough" in the wail of a passing train and almost stabs an innocent man to earn a friend's respect. But with the help of his ultracool firefighter uncle, as well as a few visits from Daniel's imaginary friend, Biffo, Harry learns to maintain a shaky composure in the face of life and his parents' horrifying breakdown. Sambrook's work is a smart addition to the genre of fiction narrated by precocious children forced to grow up too fast-a nuanced take on a nightmare. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A family tragedy seen through the eyes of a child. British author Sambrook pulls off a risky high-wire act, narrating her debut novel from the point-of-view of nine-year-old Harry Pickles, whose younger brother Dan goes missing on a school trip to Legoland. Previously a happy, popular child with a healthily dismissive, physically boisterous attitude toward his sibling, Harry is now transfixed both by his own guilt for not doing a better job of watching out for Dan and by confusion at the disintegration of all he holds dear. At home, his parents argue endlessly, and he overhears an indelible statement by his mother: "Harry's not enough." At school, he is an object of gossip, pity and then rejection by his gang of friends. Throughout all this, Sambrook avoids sentimentality, for the most part, keeping the perceptions simple and delicate. She cleverly balances a child's preoccupations (smells, food, sports, cool things, embarrassment) with Harry's innocent, tortured attempts to understand unfairness and evil, as well as with his growing anger at his parents, Mo and Dom, for forgetting about their other son, the one who's still there. Dom, a doctor, internalizes his pain, while Mo, a journalist, starts to lose her grip on reality. The two separate and Mo steals a baby, which she passes off to Harry as her own, and then she attempts suicide. It falls to Harry's Aunt Joan and Uncle Otis to offer practical life lessons, which swing between the comic (clothes) and the heartbreaking (that the family will get beyond, but never over, the loss of Dan). The story winds down a little more cloyingly, with the family grieving together, Mo recovering with the aid of counseling, and Harry back in the gameat school after an unlikely act of heroism and a farewell conversation with Dan's invisible friend. Plausible and at times compelling: a debut showing considerable technical accomplishment, although the story is essentially slender and its emotional impact glancing. $25,000 ad/promo