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A review by andrew_j_r
The Colour of Bee Larkham’s Murder by Sarah J. Harris
4.0
This is a very interesting book. It is not one that I would have found without help - it was the inaugural monthly read of a new reading group in my home town. It’s one of the reasons I love reading groups - I have been a member of some online groups before and always enjoying something that I would personally never have selected.
This is a story about a thirteen year called Jasper. Jasper has prosopagnosia, which is a condition that makes him unable to recognise faces. On top of that, he also has synaesthesia, which (in his case) means that whenever he hears a sound, he sees a colour. Because he cannot recognise faces, he knows people through the colour of their voice, although this can cause problem if, say, someone has a cold, which changes the tone and therefore the colour.
Of course, knowing the above, the title starts to make sense. I had assumed that this book was a murder-mystery, and it kind of is. Jasper is a very credulous young man, he comes across as autistic and as a result when he gets close to someone who is subsequently murdered, the clues to what happened are in his head but even he cannot see or understand them. It is very easy for other people to persuade him to believe things, and as a result, when you’re reading the book you can never be sure what you are being told is fact or a fact skewed by his interpretation of it. At the start, I was not even totally sure that Bee Larkham had in fact been killed, and that the whole thing was not an interpretational error made by the protagonist.
This book is highly enjoyable. Even though Jasper sometimes comes across like Sheldon Cooper on steroids, you to want things to be okay for him. There are lots of shades of grey in all of the characters (pun intended) which keeps you guessing about what is going on until, quite well into the book, some hard facts are presented and it does become about what happened to Bee Larkham and why.
A great read, thoroughly recommended.
This is a story about a thirteen year called Jasper. Jasper has prosopagnosia, which is a condition that makes him unable to recognise faces. On top of that, he also has synaesthesia, which (in his case) means that whenever he hears a sound, he sees a colour. Because he cannot recognise faces, he knows people through the colour of their voice, although this can cause problem if, say, someone has a cold, which changes the tone and therefore the colour.
Of course, knowing the above, the title starts to make sense. I had assumed that this book was a murder-mystery, and it kind of is. Jasper is a very credulous young man, he comes across as autistic and as a result when he gets close to someone who is subsequently murdered, the clues to what happened are in his head but even he cannot see or understand them. It is very easy for other people to persuade him to believe things, and as a result, when you’re reading the book you can never be sure what you are being told is fact or a fact skewed by his interpretation of it. At the start, I was not even totally sure that Bee Larkham had in fact been killed, and that the whole thing was not an interpretational error made by the protagonist.
This book is highly enjoyable. Even though Jasper sometimes comes across like Sheldon Cooper on steroids, you to want things to be okay for him. There are lots of shades of grey in all of the characters (pun intended) which keeps you guessing about what is going on until, quite well into the book, some hard facts are presented and it does become about what happened to Bee Larkham and why.
A great read, thoroughly recommended.