Yzabel / August 4, 2015

What Milo Saw by Virginia Macgregor

My rating: [rating=3]

Blurb:

9-year-old Milo suffers from retinitis pigmentosa: his eyes are slowly failing, and he will eventually go blind. But for now, he sees the world through a pin hole and notices things other people don’t. When Milo’s beloved 92-year-old gran succumbs to dementia and moves into a nursing home, Milo begins to notice things amiss at the home. The grown-ups won’t listen when he tries to tell them something’s wrong so with just Tripi, the nursing home’s cook, and Hamlet, his pet pig, to help, Milo sets out on a mission to expose the nursing home and the sinister Nurse Thornhill.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Here’s a novel that can pretty much be read by everyone: although the style and narrative may be a tad bit simple for adults, they also ensure that younger readers could enjoy it as well.

The story focuses on characters from a torn family: not only Milo, but also his mother Sandy, great-grandmother Lou, and a few others, like Tripi, the cook at the nursing home where Lou is sent in the first chapters. Each of these people have their own story to tell, their own little personal tragedies, some seemingly bigger (Tripi not knowing if his sister’s still alive in Syria), others more remote though not less important (Lou still mourning the loss of her beloved decades after the war that killed him). In the middle of all this, Milo tries to understand what’s happening, tries to look at a world of adults without knowing who and what he can trust, and has to balance his condition with

The issues the novel deals with are both hard and touching, all in black and white (as seen by a child) yet at the same time not as set in stone as one would think. It worked in some parts for me, and not in others, because at times they were just a bit too naive and cliché (the evil nurse, the bad absent dad who left his family for a younger wife, the nursing home that is necessarily going to be a horrible place…): befitting Milo’s point of view, less befitting the adult character’s. Nevertheless, this echoed the theme of Milo’s physical vision: revealing details other people didn’t (want to) notice while remaining, well, narrowed down as well. In that, I thought the book did a good job.

Milo’s condition was a bit of a let-down, in my opinion, because it didn’t play that much of a role. His story, all in all, could’ve been that of any 9-year old child going through his parents’ divorce, seeing his grandma being taken away, failing at school due to all the problems on his mind, and generally not getting the adults around him. I’m not sure what I expected, but I thought it would be more important, and play a bigger part (not only the one in the ending).

I don’t think it’s an earth-shattering piece of work, and it has a lot of predictable sides, but it’s definitely a feel-good one, with a mostly happy ending and everyone’s lives neatly tying together. Nobody’s left behind, not Al, not the old people at the nursing home, whose first names we don’t get to know, not even Milo’s dad. I’d recommend this story if one wants to read about hope at the end of the tunnel, in spite of the sad themes, although I wouldn’t go with the hype either.

3 to 3.5 stars.