"As it turns out, the is not remotely about Tom Cruise fighting alongside 19th-century Samurai in Japan. Rather, it follows the story of a woman named Sibylla raising her brilliant young son Ludo in in 1990s London. Unable to afford heat for their home, the two spend their days riding the . While the story is nominally centered around Ludo’s efforts to find his father, it is really about the pain and pleasure of integrating a unique mind into a world that values different things. Sibylla and Ludo both have excruciatingly high standards, the genius needed to attain them, and a near-total inability to tolerate compromise. Because most people’s lives are a series of compromises made bearable by self-delusion, Sibylla and Ludo are isolated, cut off from the outside world and outside relationships. The particular joy of the book, I think, is that the characters are so intensely and specifically themselves that it is impossible to imagine them working in a more conventional novel. But I believed in them completely — a testament to the strength of DeWitt’s writing."