Boy in the water by Stephen Dobyns

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Boy in the water
By Stephen Dobyns


I‘ve read "Boy in the water" by Stephen Dobyns.
The topics I‘ve picked are:
Landscape/environment and
The title of the book


Landscape/environment

The story takes place in New England and the nearest larger city is Boston.
When I have been reading, I got the impression that the climate and the nature looks a lot like Swedish nature and climate. The story starts on the autumn and ends at Christmas. The main character starts as a new headmaster in the autumn period. Dobyns describes the nature just like a Swedish autumn, yellow leafs, a lot of raining and in December in starts snowing. Now it does not start to snow in Sweden until January but we all like to think and hopes that the snow will come before Christmas, and we hopes every year and we will be disappointed every year, (almost) without exceptions. But Dobyns writes about the perfect Christmas, if we talk about the weather. Many other things are not that cozy this winter.

This was a bit about the landscape, now some about the school were almost the whole book takes place. The name of the school is Bishops Hill and it‘s a school for rich kids that do not fit in anywhere else. Many of the kids has a violent past and some have been abused, both sexual and in other ways.
Dobyns describes a school in distress. The trustees, the ones that have put up with the money for the school, wish to see some results or else they threaten to close it down. This is where the leading character comes in, Jim Hawthorne, and he is supposed to get the school back on it legs. But this is not popular among some people. So Dobyns start do describe this old school with a long past. The buildings as well as the teachers are aged. The buildings are falling apart and a lot of members in the faculty are have severe personal and mental problems. So the reader is getting into a pretty spooky and uncomfortable mood, which I think is the meaning since it is supposed to be a thriller.
To sum it up, Dobyns succeed to get the reader in the right mood and he does a good description about the milieu and landscape.


The title of the book

The title is "Boy in the water" and as you can guess a boy is in the water somewhere in the book. The boy who is in the water is a murdered boy. Someone has killed him with an ice pick that the murder has bashed into the back of the boy‘s head. Then he has stripped the boy so he is in his underwear. After that the murderer fling the corpse into a swimming pool. And finally he puts a kitten on the boy back so the kitten is using the body as a raft (spooky, isn‘t it?). The boy is later found and then he is a "Boy in the water", it is as simple as that.
I think Dobyns has done a pretty lousy job to put a title on his book. He could have called it something else and been a little bit more innovative. Now he has done it simple for him. He could as well have c...