Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 01/17/2024 *Starred Review* An introverted boy and his missing mother’s cherished typewriter plumb forgotten family stories while journeying toward acceptance in this touching middle-grade mystery. The Brindle family swarms distractedly around seventh-grader Ernest, everyone fixed in their ways until the morning Beatrice, his mom, vanishes. This isn’t the family’s first trauma, but, after “Everything That Happened,” Ernest finds an unexpected ally: Olivetti, Beatrice’s classic typewriter, who explains, “We [typewriters] hold thousands of stories. Worlds full of words.” Because Beatrice spilled her “secrets all over [his] keys,” Olivetti breaks his code of silence and recounts Beatrice’s writing to help Ernest trace her. As inanimate narrators go, Olivetti is especially well suited to the task and takes turns with Ernest in lending his perspective to the short chapters. And, as stories about stories go, Olivetti’s and Ernest’s insights about the power of memories, both held and shared, speak volumes. Emotional fragility pervades this introspective debut; sensitive readers should be aware of themes of major illness and its recurrence. Offering a Where’d You Go, Bernadette vibe, with its unspooling of a youth perspective on the adult world, this melancholic yet hopeful pick will appeal to fans of books with nonhuman protagonists and readers who enjoy emotional stories with alternating perspectives, such as Jasmine Warga’s A Rover’s Story (2022) and The Lost Library (2023), by Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass. - Copyright 2024 Booklist.