How To Find Your Way In the Dark

"There was a dance tonight. Sheldon had forgotten all about the dance. How had he forgotten about the dance? He had forgotten about the dance because he was busy. He had a mafia assassin to frame, a thief to rob, and vengeance to be delivered. These were (all) encompassing activities."

How To Find Your Way In The Dark is book one in the Sheldon Horowitz series by award-winning American-born author, Derek B Miller. When eleven-year-old Sheldon Horowitz lost his mother to a theatre fire in 1937, he and his father, Joseph battled on. They missed Lila, even if they didn't talk much about her, but Joseph and Sheldon were close: they connected.

His father's death, barely a year later, meant that Sheldon had to leave Whately, the woods he loved and his best friend, Lenny Bernstein, to live in Hartford with his older, city cousins and his widower uncle, Joseph's younger brother Nate. Nate acted more from duty than love but, despite a lukewarm welcome from Abe and Mirabelle, he was soon sharing with Abe his theory, as earlier disclosed to Lenny, about the murder of his father, and his plan for revenge.

The reception from his seventeen-year-old cousin surprises Sheldon, who expected scepticism. Abe is an intelligent and passionate young man who views the building fascism in Europe and the anti-Semitism in America (some blatant, some subtle or even insidious) with a concern absent in his father. Sheldon soon finds himself involved in an unlikely escapade with his cousins that nets him a snow globe of Cleveland.

What follows is a marvellous tale: part crime fiction, part coming-of-age, part war story. There are jewel thieves and fences; arson; the mob and guns and a bag of cash; B24 bombers and Nazi U-boats and thwarted enlistment; summer jobs as bellhops and comedy routines and master keys. There's infatuation and love and romance and marriage.

Miller uses apt headings rather than numbers mark the chapters. His characters are multi-faceted and many are appealing for all their very human flaws and poor decisions, because there's also kindness and courage and loyalty and doing one's patriotic duty even when country's leaders don't recognise the need. Sheldon is a thoughtful, rather earnest character whose loving upbringing has produced a young man with a strong sense of justice, one who thinks deeply on serious issues.

Some of those issues, such as the reasons for America's long delay in entering WW2, or America's attitude to Jewish refugees, are certainly thought-provoking but, lest readers expect a humourless tome, it's fair to say that this book is often laugh-out-loud funny. While there's a bit of sitcom in there, it mostly comes from Sheldon: his inner monologue; and his dialogue with Lenny, with his cousins, with his dead father, with mirror-Sheldon. One particular crossed-purpose exchange is hilarious.

This is eighty-two-year-old Sheldon from Norwegian By Night, but when he was still establishing his opinions, still developing his beliefs. Readers who met and liked the rather cranky, argumentative old man in Miller's debut novel will enjoy this examination of his early life, looking at the boy to perhaps see some of what made the man. But more than that, this is also a darkly funny tale of wrongdoing and revenge, of integrity and principles, of loss and grief, of family and friendship. Exciting, moving, insightful and hugely entertaining, this is probably Miller's best yet. This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by the author, NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.