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    The Size of the Truth
    The Size of the Truth
    The Size of the Truth
    Audiobook5 hours

    The Size of the Truth

    Written by Andrew Smith

    Narrated by Ramón de Ocampo

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    About this audiobook

    A boy who spent three days trapped in a well tries to overcome his PTSD and claustrophobia so he can fulfill his dream of becoming a famous chef in Andrew Smith’s first middle grade novel.

    When he was four years old, Sam Abernathy was trapped at the bottom of a well for three days, where he was teased by a smart-aleck armadillo named Bartleby. Since then, his parents plan every move he makes.

    But Sam doesn’t like their plans. He doesn’t want to go to MIT. And he doesn’t want to skip two grades, being stuck in the eighth grade as an eleven-year-old with James Jenkins, the boy he’s sure pushed him into the well in the first place. He wants to be a chef. And he’s going to start by entering the first annual Blue Creek Days Colonel Jenkins Macaroni and Cheese Cook-Off.

    That is, if he can survive eighth grade, and figure out the size of the truth that has slipped Sam’s memory for seven years.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMar 26, 2019
    ISBN9781508277309
    Author

    Andrew Smith

    Andrew Smith is the author of several novels for young adults, including Winger, Stand-Off, 100 Sideways Miles, and the Michael L. Printz Honor Book Grasshopper Jungle. He lives in a remote area in the mountains of Southern California with his family, two horses, two dogs, and three cats. He doesn’t watch television, and occupies himself by writing, bumping into things outdoors, and taking ten-mile runs on snowy trails. Visit him online at AuthorAndrewSmith.com.

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    Reviews for The Size of the Truth

    4/5

    13 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Weird but really funny and emotional and I loved the blend of magic realism meets reaction to trauma. Sam Abernathy is a good kid.
    • 4/5
      One of the great advantages of being a long-time bookseller is that sometimes you get really early peeks at books you're looking forward to. The downside is that you can't really talk about them except to say "Yup. I read that." This is one of those.

      EDIT 07/30/2018:

      Official ARCs are out in the world, so I can actually talk about this a bit now. And I'm going to be lazy and pretty much just share whole cloth what I sent to Andrew Smith and the good folks at Simon & Schuster after I'd read it:

      Middle Grade is not my jam. I read it and enjoy a lot of it, but the kids always seem too old--like fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds--or too young. (Admittedly, I'm not around a lot of 8-12 year-olds, so my assessment may be off.) That disconnect between stated age and the age the character acts makes it hard for me to lose myself in the story. But, having Sam be a smart and precocious eleven allows him to be both wise-beyond-his-years and kind of dumb (especially about human interaction). So kudos to Smith for writing Sam in such a way that I wasn't constantly saying to myself "An 11-year-old would never say/do that." Not having that disconnect allowed me to just fall into (#sorrynotsorry) the story.

      I suck at transitions. This is one of the (bajillionty) reasons I am not a writer.

      Bartleby. Let's talk about Bartleby, the Chekov's gun of talking armadillos. Because, yes, as soon as he was introduced I was waiting for him to say it. It's not something the target audience will get (at least I hope to all that is good and kind that they are not teaching Melville in grade school), but I'm just imagining a teacher reading the book aloud to a class and getting to that part and having to explain why she's laughing to confused fourth-graders. At first I wondered whether Bartleby was real or a figment of Sam's imagination--a way to cope with his trauma--and then I realized that he was real to Sam whether he was tangible in the real world and I should just go with it, which allowed me to enjoy the whole Bartleby adventure as a rather twisted play on all those talking animal books. Also vision quests and—being underground—the Alice books. And, yes, in spite of the fact that Sam is trapped at the bottom of a dis-used well, these are my favorite parts because they are less traumatic than middle school.

      And, gods, middle school is hard enough without being skipped ahead from 6th to 8th grade. And not even over the summer, but in the first week of school, so there's no time to gird one's loins or plead one's case for staying with other kids the same age. And then there are the awful survival camping trips. I mean, camping is bad enough (outside wants to kill you, gruesomely and a lot), but no tent, no food, no water, no shoes, ffs. I kinda hated Sam's dad for being so oblivious as to not notice that Sam was miserable on those trips. (Oblivious is the best option. If he knew and made Sam go anyway, that's like a thousand times worse.) But the horrible, horrifying camping really serves to emphasize--in bold, bug-bitten type--the core idea of parental and societal expectations, especially regarding masculinity.

      I loved that Sam and James both had passions and pursuits that were at odds with what their fathers expected of them and even at odds with what their outer appearances led others to expect of them. Sam is smart and small, so science and math and computers and engineering are obviously what he should be interested in. Likewise, James is big and intimidating so he must love and be awesome at football. Yet both boys have as their passions the traditionally feminine pursuits of cooking and dance, respectively. (Though we could get into the whole "cooking is for girls" except as it applies to the professional kitchen, which is still very much a man's world. Women cook, men "chef". That's changing, albeit slowly, but men are still the most visible and celebrated of the celebrity chefs. Obviously, I have feelings about restaurant and chef culture and there are reasons, as much as I love to cook, that I never pursued that as a career.) They're also generally less-lucrative careers (and, again, we get into "women's work" being valued less than traditionally masculine jobs, though football players would be among the first to tell you how f*cking brutal ballet is). The only thing I wished was that Sam would make more of a connection to his dad about the intersection of STEM fields to cooking. With the number of books exploring the science of cooking, there was an opportunity here that was missed, in my opinion. But, then again, Sam's eleven, so those arguments may not have occurred to him.

      And, look, I know this is Sam's book, but can I just say how much I f*cking loved James? This big, hulking kid who loved to dance and whose favourite book is Dune and who is just absolutely not at all what everyone thinks he is? I am that selfish reader who, as soon as I turned the last page, wanted nothing more than to pick up a book about James and his career in dance. I want the harsh brutality of professional dance school as only Andrew Smith could write it.