Why do we make lists? To remember to get Drano or to get Uncle Al a holiday present, for sure, but A Key to Treehouse Living suggests that lists don’t just help us organize our lives. They help us make sense of them ... Elliot Reed’s first novel is presented as if it were an alphabetical, autobiographical glossary, with entries that range from a paragraph to a couple of pages on topics such as Journey Into Deep Space and Podunk Town ... There are many more ominous notes in Reed’s elliptical novel. While supposedly writing about frogs or skipping stones, Tyce makes frequent references to exploited or abandoned children, lawbreaking and betrayal. Gradually, we begin to piece together the story of an unwanted, un-self-pitying child who figured out how to raise himself because nobody else wanted the job. The occasional brush with authorities aside, he has done an improbably good job of it.
The book, not quite a dictionary, is a compendium of observations by reluctant narrator, William Tyce, that takes readers alphabetically from 'Absence' to 'Yonder'. After reading the first few entries, you might turn to the cover to confirm that you are in fact reading a novel. It feels at first as if you’ve found yourself in the middle of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. Or that you’re reading a series of footnotes by David Foster Wallace, strung together to form a narrative. You’re compelled to ask, Where’s the story? But the voice is whimsical and engaging, so you plod ahead and soon catch on: the narrator, a young boy, orphaned, a novice to the world, is awash with wonder ... Ultimately, the book is about the journey of a vulnerable young man, searching for home, for family, for connection. A young man who has to rely almost entirely on his own perceptions and convictions. A young man open to possibilities, who will open your own world.
Reed deftly advances [protagonist] William’s story ... William’s voice is appealingly and alternately streetwise, poetic, comic, melancholy, and confused ... Through its deceptively simple structure, A Key to Treehouse Living creates a portrait of a compelling, perceptive adolescent who keeps slipping through society’s cracks, either due to circumstances or of his own volition. By the novel’s end, William is still troubled and at risk, but with the hope that perhaps his curious resilience will help him keep adding to the glossary of his distinctive alphabet.
A teenager creates a glossary to chronicle his adventures and catalogue his many losses in Reed’s dark yet uplifting debut novel. With his mother dead and his father vanished, young William ends up in the custody of an unreliable uncle and spends his days exploring the woods ... In framing William’s world as a lexicon, Reed allows readers only brief, brutal glimpses at William’s pain, nicely balanced with ample humor. But this novel’s true joy may be the wonder it radiates about a world as beautiful as it is cruel.
...Abandoned by his parents, living in his uncle’s mansion in a city in the Midwest, William’s life, as he projects it onto these pages, is an eccentrically human alchemy of loneliness, boredom, jealousy, nostalgia, brutality, and folk mythologies; and his insights range from beautifully perceptive to darkly humorous ... The life that follows necessitate glossary entries like Mystical Vision and Near Death ... Crisp and lyrical, emotionally assured, delightfully inventive—Reed has made a marvelous debut.
Orphaned after his mother’s death and his father’s disappearance, William Tyce, the young protagonist of this inventive, illuminating debut set in the rural Midwest, imposes order on the sudden chaos of his life by way of an alphabetical glossary, creating his own definitions for things such as revelation, mullet, and typewriter ... The book’s cumulative effect is much subtler than its allusions to Twain would suggest, with the central narrative mainly serving as a pretense for Reed to examine William’s unique psychology, vocabulary, and worldview ... In this novel, Reed offers an impressionistic and profound exploration of self and consciousness.
