Aaron Starmer Credit: Courtesy Starmer’s brand of whimsy leans to the Roald Dahl/Edward Gorey end of the spectrum, with genuine danger and grief always on the horizon. It always surprises me how many adults assume that children’s fiction is inherently simpler than anything they would choo se to read. Whatever you think of today’s biggest sellers in the category, a glance back at weird and wonderful classics such as E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler demonstrates that stories for kids can have many levels of meaning — including ones we don’t fully grasp until we reread them as adults. As the author of numerous novels for middle-grade and teen readers, including Night Swimming, Spontaneous and The Riverman trilogy, Waitsfield’s Aaron Starmer no doubt knows something about those assumptions. The title of his new middle-grade novel, You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This, plays on our ever-evolving beliefs about what we’re “old enough” or “too old” for. Librarians know that many kids, for instance, are eager to “read up” to the outer limits of their maturity. But as it happens, even seasoned adult readers should find You Are Now Old Enough more than twisty and strange enough to keep their attention. A multigenerational tale of family love and lore, this story mutates as you read it — much like an enigmatic creature at its center, which initially appears to be a striped dog named Tiger and later emerges as something else entirely. On the literal level, the words “You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This” appear on a mysterious envelope that various characters encounter at various points in the story. They have special resonance for the protagonist, 12-year-old Roman Barnes, who is the youngest of six cousins and hence accustomed to being told that, say, he’s not old enough to hear Grandpa Henry’s story of the Toe Beast. Naturally, being too young doesn’t stop Roman from getting obsessed with the Toe Beast: “Was it a beast made of toes? Or was it a beast that ate toes?” he wonders. So does the reader, since Starmer’s close third-person narration keeps us equally uninitiated. Until, that is, Grandpa Henry dies — right after a strange rant about the Toe Beast — and Roman is sent to pack up his belongings. In the attic, the boy finds a mason jar that stinks of formaldehyde and a notebook containing a cryptic story about a young girl and her stray-dog pack. None of it seems to add up. But a series of clues leads Roman to a key that opens his grandfather’s tool shed, where he makes a seemingly impossible discovery. At this point, adult readers may think they grasp where the plot is headed. But whatever they’ve guessed, they’re probably wrong. You Are Now Old Enough is a delicate construction of seemingly unconnected puzzles: the Magic 8 Ball Roman receives for his birthday (which offers a “yes” to every question); the Toe Beast; the unconcluded story of “A Girl and Her Dogs”; the door in the basement that may or may not hide dark secrets (see sidebar excerpt). You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This by Aaron Starmer, Penguin Workshop, 281 pages. $18.99. Credit: Courtesy As Starmer piles oddity on oddity, he switches narrative modes, too, zipping from third to first person and past to present tense and back. Self-aware titles guide us along: “The Chapter in Which His Mom Tells Her Story,” “The Chapter That Is in the Format of a Screenplay (So You Can Understand What Roman Was Watching in the Video).” This may sound cutesy, but Starmer’s brand of whimsy leans to the Roald Dahl/Edward Gorey end of the spectrum, with genuine danger and grief always on the horizon. Roman’s mom’s chapter sheds light on a traumatic incident in which he nearly lost her. The Toe Beast is real, and a bit scary. The girl and her dog pack grant wishes — but, as in fairy tales, you’d better be careful how you phrase them. The jacket and interior illustrations by Jaime Zollars, including a helpful Barnes family tree, reinforce the general atmosphere of ominous charm. Early in the novel, we learn that the Barneses have a tradition of family movie night. Roman’s teenage brother, apparently a budding fan of cult distributor A24, opts for “strange movies with jumbled timelines and ambiguous or unresolved endings, the types where villains would win, or the screen would fade to black while leaving more questions than answers.” While their father’s typical reaction is the classic “Well, that’s two hours of my life I’m not getting back,” Roman finds he enjoys these films’ open-endedness, the sense that there’s always “more to the stories.” You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This is a book for people who crave both the suggestive strangeness of those movies and the emotional resonance of old-fashioned storytelling. Despite featuring many canines, it’s ultimately no shaggy-dog story. Starmer has an ingenious plan for weaving all his plot strands together, while affirming the power of family, friendship and fellowship against the terrors of isolation. Many books for kids — and adults, for that matter — lack that teasing promise of “more” that Roman loves. This isn’t one of them. Take an early passage in which Roman realizes his dad never rehearsed the tale of the Toe Beast, though he must have known the storytelling duties would fall to him after his own dad was gone: “Roman had always assumed that adults were ready for death. That preparations were made, traditions passed on. Clearly that wasn’t the case here.” Those three plain sentences make perfect sense to a fifth or sixth grader. But only older people are likely to plumb their subtext of grief and bewilderment: Can anybody be “ready for death”? Why did we ever assume we could be? There are some truths nobody ever feels old enough to hear, and this book of small mysteries brushes up against those great ones.  From You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This Doors were curious things. They were the beginnings of stories. Or sometimes the endings. Opening a door could change the course of a life, or at least that’s what Roman had been told. It was his cousin Fiona who had told him that, way back when he was in fourth grade and she was in eighth, a gap of only four years that felt monumental. For Thanksgiving, everyone was sleeping at Fiona’s house and Roman was relegated to an air mattress at the far end of the basement. As Fiona was helping him stretch a fitted sheet across his rubber bed, she noticed he was staring at a rust-stained metal door in a shadowy corner of the room. She flipped her dark, curly hair back so he could see her knowing smile. “You’re wondering about that door, aren’t you?” “What’s back there?” Roman asked. “What if I told you there was a portal back there?” she said. “To another dimension?” Roman asked. “To a place where awful things once happened.” “Oh…” She shrugged. “Or maybe there’s nothing but a rusty old bucket back there.” “Um … okay,” Roman responded. Because he wasn’t sure what else to say. All he needed to know was that there was nothing truly worrisome behind that door. Riddles wouldn’t help him figure that out. “Lemme just give you some advice,” Fiona said. “If someone tells you not to open a door, and you decide to do it anyway, then you better be ready.” The original print version of this article was headlined “The Plot Thickens | Book review: You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This, Aaron Starmer” The post Book Review: ‘You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This,’ Aaron Starmer appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less