Fifteen Days Without a Head by Dave Cousins
He’s 15. He’s 15. He’s 15. I kept reminding myself that the kid was 15 because each act/thought on his part had me feeling like he should be acting older or thinking older, yet there would be instances of him not being and not doing so. The consequence: him come across as a tad young.
It reads like that movie of that kid on his own with a kid brother to look after! Dude, the magazine cut outs for food! Dude, ketchup soup! Endearing AND heart breaking... and if that’s the effect Fifteen Days was going for, it succeeded. You couldn’t help wanting something else for them. But when things went toward the too-odd that I don’t think a fifteen year old would do the same, well the feels couldn’t keep me from doubting. There’s a shift to rooting for him and wanting to hug the kid, to simply needing to see how things pan out.
While nothing is easy for the guy… things are suspended somehow. It’s that in between moment of him seeing bad things about to happen and him not knowing what to do. So he just goes about his business, tries to make do… but there’s also those moments of absurd. It’s not even the nosy neighbors and well meaning friends or kid brother as Scooby that’s absurd, NO those things actually made sense to me! it’s his (non) reactions, refusal to move on and going like nothing’s dong that got me. Then desperate moments of dress up, and him and his fantasies of holidays on the horizon? Absurd? Or maybe, just heartbreaking because it’s with these impossibilities that he’s making do.