The Wrong Child
by
Barry Gornell
The Wrong Child would have rate as one of the worst audio books I have listened to. I specify audiobooks, as some reviewers have rated it quite the opposite. The only reason, I can think of for a high rating, is that it is a book to ‘read’.
The narrator, while not as good as Sean Mangan, was reasonably good and he did his best to hold his audience’s attention.
The Wrong Child is supposed to be a story about a town where twenty-one of twenty-two children were killed in an accident. However, the accident was not described, or explained, as far as I can remember until the last few minutes of the forty-second, and last track, or chapter.
And sadly The Wrong Child had nothing to do with a child being kidnapped or some other such event. Rather The Wrong Child was the one who was not killed and unfortunately, for him, none of the townsfolk, including his parents, liked him.
Aside from all of the above other low-lights, planted in my mind, included, but we’re not limited to:
-
A man walking into a school classroom and frightening the students
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A man digging a grave, stripping naked, folding his clothes and then? We don’t know because the story took one of its many leaps which left me wondering had I missed a chapter.
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The surviving child, known as ‘Dog’ (not Douglas) liked to masturbate which was described in detail on several occasions.
-
The local priest was not as celibate as he was supposed to be.
All in all it was The Wrong Book for me, at least
I have rated
The Wrong Child
a lowly
read.
Goodreads readers have rated
The Wrong Child
an average of 3.13 stars from 15 ratings and 8 reviews
The Wrong Child
can be purchased on-line at
Fishpond, Booktopia and Amazon
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