An amazing, heart-rending novel of love, loss, and hope.
Creative Staff
Author: Sarah Pinborough
What They Say
Toby’s life was perfectly normal…until it was unraveled by something as simple as a blood test. Taken from his family, Toby now lives in the Death House; an out-of-time existence far from the modern world, where he, and the others who live there, are studied by Matron and her team of nurses. They’re looking for any sign of sickness. Any sign of their wards changing. Any sign that it’s time to take them to the sanatorium. No one returns from the sanatorium. Living in his memories of the past, Toby spends his days fighting his fear. But then a new arrival in the house shatters the fragile peace, and everything changes. Because everybody dies. It’s how you choose to live that counts.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
This novel will break your heart, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
Toby lives in the Death House. Sentenced there by a blood test, he waits out his days with the other boys and girls who also possess the “defective” gene. He and the others measure their lives by every breath, every pill the nurses give them, waiting for signs that the defective gene will activate, waiting for the night when the nurses come to take them to the sanatorium—a place from which no one returns.
Although not the oldest, Toby takes on the role of leader for his particular dorm. He lives with the too-smart-for-his-own-good Louis, the obnoxiously pious Ashley, and the innocent and hopeful Will, who’s the youngest of the group. Toby wears his role reluctantly, and tries to distance himself from the others. He sleeps most of the day and secretly refuses to take his “vitamins” at night, knowing that they’re actually tranquilizers.
While the days belong to the nurses, the nights belong to Toby. That is, until a new group of defectives arrive and a girl named Clara invades Toby’s night. At first, Toby resents her, and fears that she will screw up the only good thing he has in this place, but soon the two fall in love, and the Death House will never be the same.
Sarah Pinborough pens a moving, magical, heart-wrenching story about children who know their time is almost up. This book is about love, cruelty, survival, and the small acts of kindness that make life worth living. By the end of the book I cried. I cried for Toby and Clara. I cried for Will and Louis. I even cried for Ashley, pompous pious git that he was. Each character was written with such depth and humanity that I couldn’t help but be moved by the unfairness of their plight.
Pinborough does a fantastic job of putting the reader into the situation through the use of first person and present tense. Typically, I find present tense to be the written equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, but here it works beautifully. It highlights the immediacy of the situation—the timelessness of the waiting room, of the death watch. It also highlights the youth of the characters, as childhood is dominated by the immediate and the future, with little regard for the past. Although the past does play a role. At the end of certain chapters, Pinborough presents a slice from Toby’s past. She writes these slices in third person and past tense, and it’s an excellent authorial decision because it helps create and maintain the distance Toby feels for his time before the Death House. Typically, switching point of view and verb tense is a no-no, but Pinborough does it with such deft grace that it completely works.
When I first started reading this, I couldn’t help but think of it as a YA version of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Toby reminds me of Chief Bromden; Matron, the head nurse, reminds me of Nurse Ratched; and Clara fulfills the Randle McMurphy role. But after I finished reading, I realized that describing it that way would be too reductive and downplay the unique aspects of Pinborough’s writing. While it may have taken Cuckoo’s Nest as its inspiration, The Death House is its own story.
The only possible snag that some might find with the story is that the time and place are not contextualized and the defective gene is never explained. The book provides enough context clues to point to this being in the future, and that the defective gene is some sort of mutation (at one point I almost thought they were going to turn into zombies, but thankfully that didn’t happen), but that’s about it. Some may not like that vagueness, but I think that it works to the story’s benefit. For one, it’s not really necessary to the story, and two, it helps put us in the same headspace as the kids. We know about as much as they do, and that’s not a lot. Part of the reason that this book works so well is because we are there with the kids. There is no real narrative distance between us and the characters, meaning that we feel every cut, every scrape, every jab of fear. Sometimes this makes the story emotionally exhausting, but that’s good. Good art should allow us to experience the totality of human life—both the good and the bad. Good art also changes you. Like the protagonist, you go on your own character journey. Make no mistake, The Death House is good art.
In Summary
This is the first novel I’ve read by Sarah Pinborough and it made me an instant fan. The Death House is one of those rare gems where the writing and the storytelling are both superb (too often it seems like we get one or the other). It was moving, gripping, and wonderful. Dr. Josh gives this an…
Content Grade: A+
Released By: Titan Books
Release Date: September 1st, 2015
MSRP: $14.95