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The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean | LitPick Book Reviews
The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean
The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean
The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean
David Almond
From master storyteller David Almond comes a gripping, exquisitely written novel about a hidden-away child who emerges into a broken world.Billy Dean is a secret child. He has a beautiful young mother and a father who arrives at night carrying the scents of candles and incense and cigarettes. Birds fly to his window. Mice run out from his walls. His world is a carpet, a bed, pictures of the holy island, and a single locked door. His father fills his mind and his dreams with mysterious tales and memories and dreadful warnings. But then his father disappears, and Billy’s mother brings him out into the world at last. He learns the horrifying story of what was saved and what was destroyed on the day he was born, the day the bombers came to Blinkbonny. The kind butcher, Mr. McCaufrey, and the medium, Missus Malone, are waiting for him. He becomes The Angel Child, one who can heal the living, contact the dead, bring comfort to a troubled world. But there is one figure who is beyond healing, who comes looking for Billy himself — and is determined on a kind of reckoning.

Book Details

Genre: 

  • Fantasy
  • Fiction

Age Level: 

  • Mature Young Adult
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Know that I did not complete this book, so I haven't read the entirety of it. This book had a poetic feel to it. It didn't come out in rhymes, but it did come out in a very metaphysical tone and made you wonder what was actually going on. This book took you on a roller coaster and left you wondering what was real and what was storytelling.

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Billy Dean has had quite an unorthodox upbringing.  His world consists of four walls, some furniture, and other necessities.  He spends his days in this room, often with his mother, and in the darkness of the night his father returns to cast a shadow over Billy Dean’s quite simple life.  It was the chaos of the outside world, unbeknownst to Billy, which drove him to his confinement and forced him to be a “secret” child.  He witnesses this destruction when he finally emerges from his miniscule world at the same time as those around him witness his powerf

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