Clayton Stumper is an enigma.
He might be twenty-five years old, but he dresses like your grandad and drinks sherry like your aunt.
Abandoned at birth on the steps of the Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, he was raised by the sharpest minds in the British Isles and finds himself amongst the last survivors of a fading institution.
When the esteemed crossword compiler, Pippa Allsbrook, passes away, she bestows her final puzzle to him: a promise to reveal the mystery of his parentage and prepare him for his future.
Yet as Clay begins to unpick the clues, he uncovers something even the Fellowship have never been able to solve – and it’s a secret that will change everything…
Comment: In this month of September, the theme for the TBR Challenge post is "friend squad", which I interpreted as a story where friendship or situations among friends were to take place. Since this story features a group of people who become friends and even start their own club of a shared love for puzzles and such, I thought no further.
The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers is a club founded by Pippa Allsbrook, and her goal was to create a group where the brightest minds would work together to make the best puzzles and other related challenges. They have lived together for years but now Pippa has died and she left a set of clues for Clayton, the baby they found abandoned on the steps of the club twenty-five years ago. Clayton knows he seems odd for those of his generation but he genuinely loves the club's members and his mother Pippa, so that is why he decides to follow her clues to learn about his birth parents and where he came from. On the way, he has to let go of habits and go on an adventure to London...and maybe abroad. But is Clayton ready to try new things and solve his own puzzle?
I had not heard of the author before seeing references to this book and it seems it is his debut. I was seduced by the blurb and the labels associated with it, mainly "fiction", "mystery" and "book club", which translate to me as something I might enjoy and that happened with other books. However, this story is actually a lot more fiction than any other label, and the story is divided into two times: the present with Clayton going on in his quest, and in the past, where we see how the fellowship was created and how the several members went on with their days.
I must confess this surprised me a lot, and it made for a slightly disappointing read. I say this because dividing the story so much between the two periods took out some urgency of the present situation, which I think should have had more attention. If the past period scenes were to be just three or four key chapters, let's say to explain or to give context to something important... but as it was, I felt the story drag a lot. It's funny because those chapters in the past did put in evidence the way the friendship of the fellowship members mattered so much to each individual, but I think this aspect did not have to be given so many pages for the message to come across.
Thus, when I think about the constant chapters in the past, I think about too much time spent on repetitive notions, even if the actual situations showed interesting tidbits. But this could have been achieved with a conversation or by other means. I suppose the idea was to set up Clayton's task in the present, but the alternated chapters kind of lost me this way; perhaps a few chapters in the past, and the rest of the novel in the present would have worked out better for me.
The present chapters, with Clayton searching for the clues to lead him to find out about his birth parents was a lot more engaging to me, but, of course, it was also very frustrating because we kept having to break through what he was doing for the next past chapter to come next. This means I didn't really feel an emotional connection with what was happening and while I appreciated the book's intention - Clayton doing the puzzle of the clues to learn the truth - the way it happened wasn't very stimulating.
I should say the book includes the graphic image of the same clues Clayton is given so that the reader can try the same challenge. I've found this to be cute but not especially rewarding. In fact, as the clues pile up and the truth becomes known, seeing how Clayton's parents behaved and why they left him for Pippa just seemed... troubling and the final reveal, when Clayton finally learns things, was definitely the emotional impact I imagined. It made many situations of the book seem weak and I've wondered why bother with so much information anyway.
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