Reviews
"An astonishing debut by a gifted young writer. Up High in the Trees captures, pitch-perfectly, the voice of one autistic nine-year-old boy. That the story is also compelling, beautifully written, humorous, and heartbreaking makes it necessary reading. Sebby Lane is a Little Prince for our times." -- Cristina Garcia, "This is a very moving and perfectly convincing portrait of the inner life of an unusual boy, Sebby, cast into the deep black waters of a mother's death. As his family thrashes and drowns and treads water around him, he has to choose if and how to survive. Brinkman's portrait of Sebby and his family is humane and uncompromising, never maudlin, and, in the end, we root for Sebby as if he were our own." -- Dave Eggers, "Up High in the Trees is a hauntingly beautiful debut, a stunner. Klara Brinkman has masterfully created an enchanting, poignant, and wholly original child narrator out of taut, spooky, electric sentences and elegant, musical concisions. The most remarkable thing is that you don't, at first, notice the razor-sharp precision of Brinkman's technique; the book is so vibrant, so alive, It's as if she's channeling this nine-year-old boy and his visceral, riveting, often terrifying, depiction of the otherworld that is childhood." -- Maud Casey, "Up High in the Trees is a visceral, heart-wrenching, gorgeous book. What moves me most about Brinkman's first novel is the voice: It's pitch-perfect and mesmerizing. With Up High in the Trees Brinkman has created a fully realized, wholly original, and powerfully felt world." -- Alison Smith
