Reviewer: Laura Gibson

“If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.”

And so begins the story of Edgar Mint, a half-apache “miracle boy” who not only survives this freak accident, but has a knack for out-smarting death time and time again. When Edgar wakes up from a coma he finds himself orphaned and at the beginning of a long, heart-wrenching, sometimes hilarious journey. The only constant in his life being an old typewriter in which he uses to document the pages of his life (“…pages bundled and stacked and useless, my zigzag life accumulated on paper.”)

After Edgar leaves the comfort of St. Divines Hospital he ends up at Willie Sherman, a boarding school straight out of hell. Subsequently, our young hero makes a feeble attempt to land himself back at St. Divines by hitting himself over the head with a brick! One of my favorite passages from Mr. Udall’s beautiful and endearing novel is when some of the kids, including Edgar, set fire to a barn in an act of rebellion after a classmate’s suicide:

“…the entire barn was a single body of fire, the beams and joists glowing within like red-hot bones, the ancient, dried-out pine boards dissolving in the flames like curtains of gauze, spitting embers and cracking apart with the sharp reports of gunfire. The roof came down with an eruption of sparks and then the whole thing collapsed in on itself, sending up a fireball that lit up the trees and the silo and the far-off mesas in a single white flash. I fell back, covering my face, a strange prickling thrill running through me like a current. I stood up and shouted with everything I had, a soprano keening that tore my lungs raw, joining the other boys as we spun and hollered at the edge of the firelight under a shower of sparks. There were sirens and cars pulling up and the policemen and teachers standing back in the darkness near the road, but we kept it up, circling the blaze, bare-chested and heedless, our eyes full of fire, stomping and howling like the savages we were.”

Despite the fact that God seems to have it out for this kid, Edgar never loses site of his ultimate goal: to find his ‘tribe’ and to locate the mailman who ran over his head to tell him that he’s okay, that he made it. And somehow, through it all, Edgar Mint never loses his heart.