The Daily Telegraph - Features
Surprisingly uplifting tale of family strife
They rely not on food banks but funerals, which they gate-crash for free canapés
Children’s books
The Boy in the Suit
by James Fox
384pp, Scholastic, T £7.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP £7.99, ebook £7.99
★★★★★
From Huck Finn to Charlie Bucket, many of the greatest heroes of children’s literature have been poor. But in recent years there has been a more didactic approach to the subject of poverty in fiction, with authors setting out to teach even the youngest readers about the reality of modern-day hardship. In It’s a No-Money Day (2019) by Kate Milner, a picture book aimed at children as young as three, a child talks about her mother’s dependence on food banks; The Wrong Shoes by Tom Percival (2024) is narrated by a boy whose father is unemployed following an injury on a building site.
The Boy in the Suit, by the debut novelist James Fox, is similarly direct. The narrator is 10-year-old Solo. He and his mother Morag – whom he calls by her first name – rely not on food banks but funerals, which they gate-crash for free canapés. In this inventive plot, the financial challenges facing Solo and his mother are clearly explained: “Why couldn’t we just go to the supermarket and fill up a trolley like everyone else?” Solo asks. “I already knew why: money. There was never enough of it… Money was stretched so thin it was almost see-through.”
Solo is made to dress in a suit for the funerals, and is instructed by his mother to fill his pockets with as much food as he can. After years of practice, he’s a reluctant but resigned accomplice: “I still got a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach just before I went inside.
It was a sickly mixture of excitement and nerves, but mostly it was because I was hungry.” But Solo and Morag’s strategy backfires when they gatecrash the funeral of a famous footballer, and Morag gets drunk in front of the press photographers. “Drunk Mum Crashes Football Legend Memorial” reads an ensuing headline, and when the humiliated Morag goes missing, it will fall to her abandoned son to find her.
In lesser hands, the story could make for heavy reading, with Solo’s woes compounded by his mother’s failing mental health. “There were so many words like depression and anxiety floating around,” he tells us, “but I wasn’t sure whether that’s what Morag had. All I knew was that some of her moods were trickier than others.” But Fox writes with great warmth and humour: his triumph is to turn this story of modern domestic strife into an uplifting read, with plenty of surprises en route.