Suddenly, the book is warming up to be quite the suspensful read. In this quarter of the book, we discovered new information from Mrs. Alexander surrounding Chris' mother's death. The hints that we get are that Chris' mother may have never died. She left with Mr. Shears (the man that Chris accused of killing Wellington) to live somewhere else and had an affair with each other. In Chris' words, "because he was doing sex with someone else when he was married to Mrs. Shears."
We also see the stress in the relationship between Chris and his dad. After his dad repeated several times that he didn't want Chris to go snooping around in other people's business, he finally lost it when he found Chris' book filled with his "evidence" in the murder. It concludes with Chris grabbing/scratching his dad (I was a bit confused at this point) and his dad hitting him back.
Otherwise, this section was darker than the first half of the book.
Still, I think that it is a generally humuorous read. At one point in the book, he goes on about he has to take chances with this mystery. By the end of this digression, we were doing a deep analysis of a newspaper column revolving around luck and how this certain person was deemed wrong by so many people. We were shown a (rather confusing) mathematical problem and a (less confusing) graph showing the outcome of a game show. After all that, it left me with a little bit of a "dafuq did I just read?" feel. It made me laugh how we digressed that quickly.
Near the end of the section is when things get exciting. Chris ended up losing his book and decided to search in his father's room for his book. Even though he didn't find his book, he did find an old shoebox filled with letters adressed to Chris. Intriguing...
Upon opening one of the letters, he sees that they are in his mother's handwriting and mailed a few months after his mother died. One letter talks about how his mother is now enjoying her job as a factory worker in London.
Whoah. Back up. Slow the **** down. His mother never really died? Despite all the talks and apologies from the neighborhood for the family's "loss?" It means that Chris' dad has been lying the entire time. And he's all about Chris being honest to him. Isn't this in the slightest way hypocritical?
Well, sorry, I digressed. However, further reading of the various letters reveals that Chris' mother is alive, and did indeed split from his dad to live with Mr. Shears, which explains why Mrs. Shears is single and explains the line "Mr. Shears is an evil man." This was said earlier in the book by Chris' dad.
This is turning into a big mystery. I'm liking the book more and more.
I too, Zach was taken by surprise from the sudden revealing of Christopher's mother's very alive state. Bethany suggested it wasn't much of a surprise but I'd have to disagree. The amount of foreshadowing is also astonishing, and you picked up on something I didn't think about; the line about Mr. Shears being an evil man.
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