Review of book "The Boy Who Steals Houses"
How to use 3rd-person present tense to make your heart 💓or 💔
This tale of two deeply traumatized and flawed brothers is one of the most emotional stories I’ve ever read that had me crying ugly tears. Even on my re-read, I cannot avoid crying; it’s that good. How did the author move so many people so deeply with this book?
Skip down to the second half for the analysis of her use of 3rd-person present tense to learn more, but first, here’s a summary:
Why should everyone read this?
This heartbreaking story features runaway teen brothers who have lost everyone they loved and are longing to find a home, but they have no one who understands nor supports them more than each other.
Sam is only 15 and running from inner demons that ignite every time someone hurts Avery, his brother with autism. While the homeless Sam survives by breaking into empty houses left by vacationing families, he's eventually caught when one family comes home earlier than expected. This massive family accepts him instantly in a case of mistaken identities, and Sam longs to be part of their family so badly that he keeps lying and pretends he knows them because he is desperate to stay … especially as he starts falling for the lovely girl Moxie.
Meanwhile, his brother Avery falls in with a gang that uses and abuses him, and Sam struggles to save Avery when he can hardly save himself.
Not only does this book offer the most respectful and get-wrenchingly honest portrayal of what it can be like to have someone with autism in your family, it also shows a powerful bond between these brothers who are willing to go through hell and back again to save each other. Nothing is sugar-coated. All the character flaws are front and center. Even better, the story shows how society mistreats kids like these boys by willfully choosing to ignore them and avoid making an effort to understand how to give them the help they really need.
I wholeheartedly agree with the opinion of Chantelle, LCA Intern for Library HQ when she described “The Boy Who Steals Houses” so well in her review as:
“It’s a rollercoaster of jumbled feelings and emotions with a thought provoking look at how the world looks at those who are “different”.
The mesmerizing writing technique:
I’m generally not a fan of 3rd person present tense, simply because it’s too easy to do it poorly and lose focus on the novel’s heart. It takes a lot of skill and setting some very solid POV consistency rules throughout the book to make 3rd-person present flow well in a story.
This book was the first novel that changed my mind about 3rd-person present. Why? The author had a clear purpose for choosing this style that is supremely compelling. Written in any other POV or tense, it wouldn’t be able to pull this off.
C.G. Drews crams more emotion onto the page than in any other book I’ve read with this secret:
💡She takes 3rd-person present and makes it feel like deep 1st-person with omniscient vibes.💡
How is that possible? Let’s look under the hood:
Those of us who have a very vocal inner critic (I know I’m not alone here – chime in with comments below if you feel this) are highly familiar with that running commentary voice that narrates about all our mistakes to ourselves.
This voice is the one that frequently looks at us from outside ourselves and goes, “How the fuck did you manage to mess it all up this badly, Einstein? Showing some real creativity these days, aren’t we?”
The author uses this perspective to almost let the character step outside themself and comment on all the dirty truths they hide. I do mean the kind of things your therapist notes down about you in a classified file after you’ve left the room. Look, most people will die without realizing what they were really doing nor why, but the use of 3rd-person present tense in this novel brings all that dirt up to the surface.
I’ve picked two scenes below to show how it works in the most emotionally charged moments.
**These interpretations are entirely my own, and you could interpret it differently depending on how you look at it and what resonates with you because many emotions are subjective.**
I know, a bunch of literary traditionalists are out there protesting:
“A proper novel must be written in past tense. And who ever thought of using the despicable present tense in 3rd-person??!! Preposterous!”
I also imagine these voices to sound something like this:
However, the only real rule in writing a novel is to use what works. And here, this works to make you feel so many things.
Action! 🎬
I’ve put my comments in italics below to help separate my notes from the text.
In this scene, Avery’s new “friends” have dragged him into a nightclub and completely ignored how triggering this setting is for him:
Sam slams through the thin wall of elbows and silk jackets and perfumed skin – and sees his brother.
Avery’s tucked tight to the brick wall, black button-down shirt ripped open at the collar and long scratch marks cutting from throat down his chest. His own work. His fingers scrabble in loose gravel, open and close, open and close, like he’s trying to hold on, before he flings his hands up to hit his head, his ears. His world is spinning out from under him.
Notice how we see Avery first, and then we see Sam’s deductions of how Avery got hurt based on past experiences, and then the 3rd-person present tense circles closer and closer to Avery’s feelings. We’re not slipping into Avery’s POV, but the observations Sam makes about how Avery looks like he’s trying to grab onto something seamlessly blends into that beautifully emotional sentence, “His world is spinning out from under him.” Sam is such an empathic character and so closely connected to his brother Avery that immediately he gets a sense of what Avery is feeling and why Avery is acting this way.
He screams and screams.
They’ve pushed him too much.
The world has always been a hot coal on Avery’s skin. He is made of raw nerves that touch and feel and see everything too hard and too fast, and if you burn him too much – you get this. Overload. Catastrophe. Drowning.
This is the part where the tears typically start for me while reading. It’s the most painfully accurate description of how someone with autism feels when having a breakdown. I feel the burning of the sensory overload when reading this, and that it builds on the desperate sensation described one paragraph above about trying to hold onto something to regain stability. The voice here is observing and connecting with Avery simultaneously so that readers understand why he’s in so much pain.
Sam shoves people back, yelling even though he doesn’t mean to. “He’s fine! He’s fine! Just go away.”
“Is it some kind of fit?”
“Get the cops.”
“I can call an ambulance—”
“No!” It’s nearly a scream now. Sam wants to slam the phone out of the do-gooder’s hand. “No, just leave him alone. I’ve got him. I’ve got him.” He drops to his knees, reaching slowly for Avery. “I’ve got you.”
He should never have let it get this far.
Sam’s selfish fault.
These last two lines are a gut punch of blame. If this part would’ve been written in first person like, “I never should’ve let this happen. This is all my fault;” then consider how much less of an impact that has here. By keeping it in 3rd-person present, the voice of internal criticism sounds harsher and feels more punishing. We can feel as readers how Sam always assumes full responsibility for anything that goes wrong with Avery because Sam fully considers himself Avery’s only protector. Here we feel the pain Sam carries while acting not just as Avery’s brother, but also like his parent, despite still being a teen himself. Sam is effectively screaming at himself here.
Then Avery slams his body against the wall, head cracking with a sick wet thwump against the bricks. His screams pitch higher.
Sam explodes forward, snatching Avery’s head before he can bang it again. He wraps his arms around Avery, hard and fast and suffocating, and as Avery swings out with fists and teeth – Sam holds tighter. Tighter.
Tighter.
Pressure.
Calm him down with pressure.
Avery’s fist connects with Sam’s stomach.
Again.
again
Sam takes it all with the smallest grunt. He crushes Avery’s head to his chest and rocks, just keeps rocking, until Avery’s thrashing arms suddenly go limp and he slumps into Sam.
“Sammy?” He looks up with frantic, damp eyes and blood pours from his lips.
Sam turns Avery’s head so it fits against his T-shirt, blocks out the world. The lights. The people. Everyone’s drifted away, muttering about fits and crazy kids on drugs. Sam doesn’t care. He’s just glad they’re alone and Avery has space to breathe between cars and walls and the black star-bitten sky.
It’s interesting how this line mentions “between cars and walls” because this scene takes place indoors. The effect is transportive though, expanding the reader’s vision of the scene as Sam relaxes, remembering where they are again. As Avery feels himself protected and gaining space to breathe deeper, so too does Sam finally relax. “The black star-bitten sky” is my favorite phrase here because it gives that feeling of spaciousness, but a spaciousness that has survived an attack, thus “bitten” by stars. I can feel how much pain the boys have survived in this strong description.
There are funny moments too where it also works well, like this one:
In this scene, Sam is hiding in the house he’s broken into when one of the family members he recently met suddenly discovers he’s been secretly living there:
Moxie has the babies and one of them has been crying since six.
There’s a crash downstairs followed by a wail and then Moxie yelling, “That’s how I feel about today too, but do you see me crying about it?”
A stupid fantasy plays out in the back of Sam’s head, where he goes downstairs and holds the baby while Moxie catches her breath and then she smiles at Sam and her fingers interlock with his and they lean super close and—
Footsteps pound up the stairs.
“Toby, no. You’re not using my box of industrial glitter.”
“I need it!”
“What? To bathe in? Put it down before I turn you into a pie and put you in the oven.”
“I’m not a pie!” Toby shrieks.
“TRY ME.”
A small smile tugs at Sam’s lips. At least they’re not all huddled over a hospital bed and a little boy of broken bones. He’d jump in front of a car a thousand times over if he never had to see that petrified horror fracturing Moxie’s face again.
He’s also figured why no one goes into the office – it was their mother’s.
He’s seen Mr De Lainey’s handwriting on odd sticky notes, but a different hand has scrawled over stacks of ledgers, journals, phone books and the backs of photos. Dust lines the bookshelves. Her bookshelves? The walls are taped with curling pictures of a woman with thick chocolate hair. She holds babies and pushes gap-toothed twins on swings and pulls funny faces with a miniature Moxie. He wonders what happened to the De Laineys’ mother. Did she walk out too?
Notice how the perspective wanders around the details with a curious tone. The voice here conveys how Sam doesn’t know what to think about the De Lainey’s missing mother yet.
Sam can’t remember his mother’s face. He wonders where she went, that day when he was seven, and if she ever felt bad about skipping out on her kids. Leaving them with him. Their dad and his fists and his molasses eyes. She’s just another reason to never, never trust adults.
Notice the big contrast in voice and emotion between the previous paragraph and this one. I can feel the jealousy in Sam’s voice with the line, “Sam can’t remember his mother’s face.” That line just echoes so strongly with the emotion of missing her, wishing he could remember. The paragraph crescendos with more emotion in the phrase I bolded after that into “Leaving them with him.” Here’s where the 3rd-person present POV really shines because it adds another layer of distance between Sam and his father, an intentional separation as if to protect himself from those painful memories. The phrase about how everything he remembers most about his father is tied to the beatings he got from him brings out the fear he felt. Then the sentence at the end about how “She’s” ➡️ again, leaning into the 3rd-person present voice to intentionally avoid calling her mother because of the resentment Sam has against her, as if she doesn’t even deserve to be called “mother” ⬅️ a reason to never trust adults has so much more feeling in it than if it had been 1st person.
“I never trust adults” is a far weaker statement than “She’s just another reason to never, never trust adults” because the second line resonates with the pain of how many times Sam has been let down by adults.
He’s about to change positions – again – because blood has rushed into his head and his skull hurts, when the office doorknob turns.
Sam drops the book.
He shoves himself off the armchair, eyes clawing desperately for his hiding place in the cupboard.
But he doesn’t have time.
The office door swings open and there’s a snatch of Moxie in a halter-neck shirt that looks like it’s been refashioned from the living-room curtains, and she’s looking over her shoulder at a tantrumming Toby.
“… because it’s illegal for kids to use glitter, actually. You have to be, like, twenty-five and then you can apply for a glitter licence—”
A huge ice cream tub of glitter is tucked into the crook of her arm.
“I am twenty-five!” Toby shouts.
“Nice try,” Moxie says and turns.
Sam’s on his feet, hands outstretched, not sure if he intends to slam the door in her face or plead for her to wait. Listen. Don’t call the police yet.
I can explain.
Except he really really can’t.
Their eyes meet.
Air escapes Sam’s lungs like they’ve been punctured. He has no words, no thoughts, nothing to change the shock unfolding on Moxie’s face.
Toby stands behind her wearing a Batman mask. “Who’s dat?”
Moxie screams.
She hurls the ice cream tub at Sam. The lid pops. The air fills with a soaring, shimmering rainbow arc.
Sam gives a muted cry—
and then two litres of glitter hits him straight in the face.
Remember how I mentioned the 3rd present voice can feel omniscient? This is exactly what I mean. Sam couldn’t possibly know that 2 liters of glitter have just hit him. That’s technically outside of Sam’s realm of knowledge, so if the book was restricted to Sam’s direct-experience POV alone, then the phrase would just be “glitter hit my face.” Alternatively, he might be so shocked that it could take him a minute to realize that the thing hitting him in the face was glitter. But because we have the more flexible perspective of 3rd-person present tense, we can immediately see that not just a little but 2 whole liters of glitter (for my American pals, that’s like a whole milk jug full of glitter, ok? 😂 ) has hit him, so we lose no time getting in on the humor of the scene.
It explodes over him, light as dust, and sticks like a second skin. It’s in his mouth, up his nose, plastered on his eyelashes.
Moxie keeps screaming.
Toby joins in.
Sam stands for just a heartbeat longer, glitter settling in pools around his feet – and then he runs.
He shoves past Moxie, vaults over Toby and flings himself down the stairs, shedding glitter in his wake. He jumps the veranda steps and his shoes hit cement.
Faster. Faster. Get out of here and don’t ever look back.
Here you can feel his inner critic scolding voice coming back to life again as it yells at him to get away, and this phrasing is great to convey just how deeply embarrassed he feels.
I loved how book reviewer Jullian Radcliffe also shared a lovely summary of the overall story and how much it pulls on your emotions while reading:
There you are! If you read this book, then you also have a second and third book in this series to enjoy too, all available when you sign up for C.G. Drew’s Patreon here.
