A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound

By John Irving

2003

First Published

4.01

Average Rating

Number of Pages

1H00M

Audio Length

In John Irving's ninth novel A Widow for One Year, a creepy children's book author named Ted Cole writes a bedtime story about things that go bump in the night. That odd, gently comical tale is brought to life here with Tatjana Hauptmann's shadowy, moonlit pencil illustrations. Young Tom wakes up in the middle of the night to an unusual sound, but his two-year-old brother Tim does not. When his fathers asks what it sounded like, Tom reveals a number of silly and scary options: "like a monster with no arms and no legs," or "a dog trying to open a door," or "a ghost dropping stolen peanuts"—"a sound like someone trying not to make a sound," in fact. The illustrations—with a smattering of wordless spreads—show the pajama-clad Tom wandering alone through a big empty house as bulges in the wall and long shadows hint at unseen horrors. In the end, the father tells his boys that the sound is just a mouse in the wall. Tom is immensely relieved, but baby Tim screams because he doesn't know what a mouse is, and stays up all night to ward off the furry, mysterious thing. Not too scary, nor too comforting, Irving's picture-book debut imaginatively captures that late-night world where everything looks and sounds a little like a monster. (Preschool to age 6) —Karin Snelson

Avg Rating

4.01

Number of Ratings

843

5 STARS

34%

4 STARS

39%

3 STARS

22%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

John Irving

Author · 22 books

JOHN IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven. Mr. Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times—winning once, in 1980, for his novel The World According to Garp. He received an O. Henry Award in 1981 for his short story “Interior Space.” In 2000, Mr. Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for his novel In One Person. An international writer—his novels have been translated into more than thirty-five languages—John Irving lives in Toronto. His all-time best-selling novel, in every language, is A Prayer for Owen Meany. Avenue of Mysteries is his fourteenth novel.