The Selected Works Of T.S. Spivet
Reif Larsen

Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet is a master mapmaker and he has just won the Smithsonian Institution’s prestigious Baird Award for the popular advancement of science. Based in North Dakota, he decides to undertake the long journey to Washington DC for the ceremony.
Oh, T.S. is also only 12 and he is sneaking off without his parents’ knowledge.
Thus begins a good, old-fashioned adventure yarn as T.S. embarks on an epic journey by train that has close shaves, musings on genealogy, geography and Newton’s laws of motion and a helpful hobo hotline.
Reif Larsen’s debut novel is distinguished by its unusual presentation. Almost every page has a lengthy aside with an explanatory drawing illustrated by T.S. The titles alone – Father Drinks Whiskey With A Sensational Degree of Regularity, When Did A Short Become A Pant? (And Other Modern Dilemmas) – give a sense of their entertaining quirkiness.
While they inevitably break the rhythm of the main narrative, they also offer insight into how T.S. thinks and how he deals with the world at large and with the death of his younger brother through his maps.
There is one grouse though. T.S. does not quite sound like a 12 year old, even if he is a precocious pre-teen. Lines such as “Even now I occasionally wet the bed, and I still maintained an irrational fear of porridge” sound jarring instead.
Larsen adds another voice to the novel by having T.S. read from his mother’s journal in which she imagines the life story of her great-grandmother-in-law. While the tale is compelling in its own right, the voices of T.S. and his mother are not distinct from each other.
The flaws, however, are not enough to derail this unusual, absorbing tale of a young man’s literal and figurative journey.
If you like this, read: Lost In A Good Book by Jasper Fforde. Fforde’s hilarious Thursday Next literary detective series uses footnotes as a communication device (the footnoterphone) between the main character’s universe and the fictional bookworld.
(ST)