Me and My Brian - Helen Rutter - ★★

AUTHOR: Helen Rutter

GENRE: Middle-grade Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: September 12, 2024

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A middle-grade novel about a boy who struggles with his overactive “Brian”. This had great potential, and some of the content has great value, but somehow, the overall book didn’t come together well enough for my liking.

Plot Preview:

Since childhood, thirteen-year-old Josh has called his brain “Brian”. Brian is very active in Josh’s life, constantly poking and prodding him towards good ideas as well as mean insults. Brian also creates a lot of insecurity by making Josh feel guilty for the family arguments between his mother and his elder brother Charlie.

When the situation at home gets too bad, Josh is sent to stay with his maternal grandmother for a few days. But she stays in a small shack in the middle of nowhere, and Brian protests vehemently. Will Josh be able to push Brian’s nagging away and strengthen his own voice?

The story comes to us in Josh’s first-person perspective.

The concept of the book is great. I love the idea of a brain that works against its human. So many of us have the inner voice that makes us question our decisions, and Brian seems to be the manifestation of the most criticising ones. The cover art and the title also made me believe that the focus of the story would be mainly on Josh’s learning how to handle his “Brian.” However, the implementation seems to be somewhat disjointed.

The book begins in a light-hearted way, with Josh introducing us to Brian and some funny outcomes of his interference. But soon, we get a glimpse of the fights between his mom and Charlie, and of how Charlie acts as a typical elder brother: mildly aloof and somewhat bullying. Then the story shows how the family arguments escalate to such an extent that Charlie decides to go live with their dad, who has his own family and a bigger house. When Josh’s mom struggles with her emotions, she decides to send Josh away to her own mom, from whom she has been somewhat estranged. There Josh learns that his grandma is a recluse who works in her own garden, and also that she too had escaped from city life after her “Briany” found it overwhelming. Josh finally learns from grandma how to tackle his Brian, but has she herself learnt how to tackle Briany yet? When Josh finally returns home, he is a bit calmer, though the situation at home is only mildly better.

See the problem? All of the above happens within just 96 pages. The story goes from one issue to another without focussing in detail on any. Each of the above scenes is a major conflict and needs proper settlement, especially in a book aimed at children. But the approach is more go-with-the-flow, with no dominant main point. Just when it seems like the final quarter would sort out everything neatly, the plot brings in yet another conflict.

Moreover, many key things aren’t revealed in the book, mainly because we get the story in Josh’s first-person voice, and whatever he isn’t aware of, we also don’t come to know. So we are not aware of how their dad or their stepmother feel about Charlie suddenly living with them without informing them beforehand, or how their mother contacts their grandmother when the latter doesn’t even have a phone. Josh tells us that his mother and his grandmother haven’t been in touch after a major fight years ago, so it is also not clear why his mother decided to send Josh all the way to a relative stranger (to him) when his own dad seemed to be accommodating enough. Charlie’s sudden good behaviour towards Josh is unexplained. Even the whole “Brian”-brain thing is left without any elucidation. The overall effect is hence quite jumpy.

It might have been easier to like the book had Josh been a boy worth rooting for. But he seems to be deflecting all his negative behaviour on to Brian. Whenever something goes wrong, it was Brian’s fault and not Josh’s. Now this might be a genuine mental health condition, but we never know the details as there’s nothing about Brian’s origins. Brian seems to be a boastful, manipulative bully, so some of his lines might be a bit traumatic to littler readers. (Worse: they might find him funny, though his behaviour actually ticks off all red flags.)

To top it all, the book has mentions of vaping, of parents’ bitter divorce, and of running away from home, none of which are topics I like to see in MG fiction. Josh also tends to allot rude nicknames to his peers and teachers, and judges them by appearance. When he terms his grandma a ‘witch’ just for how she looked, the book nosedived for me with no hope of recovery.

I usually love this publisher’s books for the way their writing follows the Hi-Lo format, with stories aiming at the middle-grade level but the language pitching a little lower so that the books are accessible to those with lower reading prowess. They are never afraid to tackle topics that might be considered dark for this age group. But this book turned out to be a rare exception, not because of the topic but because of its handling.

Basically, I had expected this book to focus on a young boy's struggling with his hyperactive mind. But it turned out to be more focussed on other topics, with the title and the cover serving more as clickbait.

The book has B&W illustrations which are decent but not outstanding. I didn’t appreciate Josh’s annoying expression in many of the sketches, so I wasn’t a fan of these.

This is just one opinion. So please do go through other reviews and see if the book might work better for your young one. It's a little complicated, but read with adult guidance, it might work decently for kids with loud interruptive brains.

My thanks to Barrington Stoke for providing the DRC of “Me and My Brian” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.