Bicentenary Boy by Mike Rothery

[Jax14]

Bicentenary Boy is the story of a young man who wakes up in the 1950s with memories of being alive in another time and another world but is stuck in a psychiatric ward where no one believes him.

Joey Horne was studying medicine in England and learning the societal niceties of life in 1754 when his parents took him out of school in order for them all to move to America. On the voyage there they are attacked by pirates and Joey is forced to become one after his parents are killed. Life aboard the ship is fraught with danger and cunning people and one day, in an attempt to evade another pirate ship, Joey and the rest of the crew sail through a strange fogbank and land up in a world beyond a world.

In the 1950s you have Dani, a psychologist, who has been tasked to debunk his claims but everywhere she has gone to look for evidence, has turned up clues to back his story up. What on earth and who is she supposed to believe?

The blurb sounded very intriguing and I was drawn to the idea of a past life or a time traveller, however, I found the story quite hard to follow and I didn’t really get into it. It starts off with a voodoo ritual/burial that goes wrong and the words used to recreate the language and accent were difficult at times to understand. Then we get sent to a section in the school in the UK as well as the story in the psychiatric ward and it becomes muddled as to how it all fits together. Suddenly we are on the pirate ship and the author has really gone into the accents used so instead of concentrating on the story I was now trying to decipher what they were trying to say. When they move into the new world there are a number of new animals, people and concepts introduced so a lot of new made-up words used which created even more confusion. This really detracted from any pleasure I would have gained from the story itself, but at least the editing is good with no major recurring mistakes.

The world beyond the world was an interesting supernatural spin on the tale, but to me, the ending and the explanation of why Joey was dying in this world was stretching it a bit. An interesting idea but a book I wouldn’t read again. This might appeal to those who specifically like books depicting pirate travels with a supernatural twist and while there was nothing wrong with the story, it just didn’t grab me enough.

Thank you to Voracious Readers Only and the author for a copy of the book.