Book Review: When I Was Five I Killed Myself

Author:  Howard Buten

This is an amazing book!  It is written from the perspective of a child aged 8.  He wavers between being highly imaginative and being very concrete in his thinking.

As the narrator - the book is written in first person - we see that the boy, Burt, is often confused in his life.  Grown ups say and do things he does not understand.  But he does his best to put a good face on life, hoping that he'll figure out what's going on eventually.

He is remembering his last year at school and also writing about what is happening at the children's center where he was sent for doing a bad thing.  The reader is kept in the dark about the bad thing until near the end of the book.

He is a normal, confused kid with a wonderful imagination and a smart aleck mouth - is he "disturbed"?  His "society" thinks it is possible. Is he a normal kid?  You be the judge.

I loved this short, sweet book - I laughed frequently.  The author really gets what it was like to be a child in school in the 1950s.  I felt the schoolroom around me - it really brought me back.