I do not understand this novel, but I like it. The characters are so flawed but care so much. Winters brilliantly shows how each understands the world as operating by certain rules, and then how they react when these rules are proven false. I love how Winters tells the story and how he describes LA.

Also fun: The novel I read just before this has a character who cut off his ponytail because, he said, judges hate lawyers with ponytails, and this one has a lawyer with a ponytail whom judges don't like very much. ( )

Thanks to a recommendation and then watching an interview with Ben H. Winters, I'll be adding more of his catalog to my TBR list. I enjoyed this book which crossed three of my favorite genres--speculative fiction, family drama, and attorney procedurals. it is a fun read and perfect for summer. ( )

If the name "Ben Winters" is on the cover, you know you're in for an unusual, inventive trip. In this case, the story revolves around an ambulance-chasing attorney who takes on a case that ends up swallowing his life and that of his adoptive son, who is something of a (very) junior partner in the law firm.

The victim: a teen who suffers a head injury, and after emergency surgery, has an unexpected outcome: he doesn't sleep or eat or grow or experience anything human, but simply walks in circles, endlessly. A living boy has been turned into an unthinking golem, and the colorful lawyer is on the hunt for a way to pin the blame on the hospital - though in fact nobody can explain what happened or what caused it. And then, as things grow more desperate, he takes on a murder case, his client the boy's father, with zero criminal law experience. In the meanwhile, a spooky zealot of a man who believes the strangely affected teenager holds the secret of a utopian future, haunts the lawyer's son and the peculiar expert witness who thinks she can explain what happened.

Compared to earlier novels replete with fully-developed and often bizarre world-building and high concept inventiveness, The Quiet Boy is a bit unbalanced. The case of the boy who walks in circles isn't all that compelling, and the cult=like fanatic who thinks he will usher in peace and enlightenment is spooky, but all of it seems a bit thin next to the endearing and well-developed father-son relationship and the case that dominates their lives. It's as if the novel is a combination of a realistic character-driven legal thriller and one very odd interruption in that reality that is strikingly strange but ends up being somewhat of a MacGuffin. The center of gravity is in the family relationships, not in the boy who has been reduced to a mindless circling figure. I wish there had been more made of the quiet boy himself--it seemed oddly undeveloped--but I certainly enjoyed spending time with the colorful lawyer, his son, and the people who are drawn into their hopeless case.