How to Build a Boat is a charming, warmhearted novel that revolves around a complicated 13-year-old boy named Jamie, and the people around him. Jamie’s mother died in childbirth, and much of what he does in life revolves around his connection with her, which is entirely derived from a short YouTube video of her competing at a swim meet.

He lives with his dad who is somewhat ill-equipped for the job. Jamie is a bit of a weird cat — it’s never disclosed if he’s neurodivergent or just simply a different sort. He rattles easily, he has a lot to say about a lot of things, and he’s a social misfit. Jamie reminded me of Christopher, the protagonist in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

He’s starting at a new school – an all-boys religious high school, and it’s not a great fit. Some of the other students torment him. The principal is a jerk. To get through it, Jamie forms bonds with a teacher who has her own complicated circumstances, and it’s unclear who is saving who.

Tess is an English teacher stuck in a relationship quickly going south. Her husband is simply not a nice guy — it appears their relationship is bordering on abusive. They’ve been undergoing IVF treatments and are out of options. It feels like they’re simply going through the motions while each waits for the other to end it.

Describing the book like this does it a disservice. The story is lovely, but the writing is the prize. Feeney’s characters do the narration, and I fell in love with all of them. Feeney began her writing career as a poet, and the style of the writing often breaks into sentence fragments that emulate scattered thoughts. It’s an effective way of projecting fear, anxiety, stress, and panic, which are all core themes of the story:

It was herself. She irked herself,

the corners she backed herself into

over and over

the way she ran from her life, running mad on Christmas Eve, running on from Jennings and Paul, rushing now to create new circles that too would ripple and crack in time. It was screaming to her, her life, her distorted Picasso face shouting at herself, asking questions…

There are some outstanding scenes in here. Feeney is subtle in the way she attacks the church, societal norms and polite society. The writing is memorable, even if the story is somewhat familiar.

Tess and Jamie seem to be loosely modeled after Feeney and her own son – she was a teacher in an all-boys school and her son was hyperlexic like Jamie. The Booker Prize interview with Feeney is fantastic:

…my writing impetus was parental anxiety: Can we live in an inclusive society by recognising each other, accepting one another without explanation of categorisation? Can we be tolerant? Essentially, will he be ok? It’s likely a primal concern for all parents.

It contains what might be my favourite quote of all time about a fiction author’s process:

I write what I know – and then I tell lies. 

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