The Nest

Thematic, moody dust jacket design, an inviting, nebulous cover flap and an engagingly grim story premise can't aid a thin narrative and the plain prose accompanying it (a few genuinely creative phrases aside) from being discouragingly mundane.

I enjoyed the setup involving our protagonist and the strange dreams visited upon him which, on the surface, seem to be little more than a youthful coping mechanism for the stressors his family is currently experiencing surrounding his sickly newborn brother. Curious fairytale logic between the dreamworld and how it crosses over with the waking world aside, how they reveal themselves becomes less and less unsettling (or interesting, for that matter) as the underdeveloped antagonist's motives are revealed to be not much more complex than “imperfection bad,” their summary demise feeling not satisfying but perfunctory.

The themes of the story are not lost on me and I found them to be generally worthwhile: The need to accept that not everything in life will be as perfectly put together as one might wish, overcoming the unique, overlooked psychological challenges of early adolescence amidst a distracted family and finding the courage to realize that ignorance of one's careless verbal contractual agreements does not absolve you of taking responsibility for them, especially when, in the context of this story, a loved one's life might be at stake, even if it means putting your own at peril.

Furthermore, I never felt close to any of the characters outside the chief protagonist and even found the threads drawn between him and his family members to be fairly thin and not nearly developed enough, outside of a meaningful passing glance he has of his dad sitting on his bed in a state of pure psychological and physical exhaustion, giving our main character an appropriate moment to reflect on how even his father is not immune to the irregularities and difficulties of reality. Throw in a completely pointless chapter involving the main character and a behavioral therapist, a wasted character in the “knife guy,” whose sole purpose is to act as a deus ex machina for the climax, contrasted with one particularly solid line (“A feeling is not a fact.”), a pertinent correlation to beds as our personal nests along with some eye-catching, gloomy, contrasty black-and-white art by Jon Klassen throughout and you have a story which, ironically, falls far short of its more perfectible imaginative potential.