Don't hit me, mummy.
The first slap is a warning. The second is the lesson. The third is never a slap.
J is eight years old, and he counts everything. The fourteen steps down the hallway. The twelve sounds the house makes at night. The seconds between his brother's footsteps and the knock on his bedroom door.
He knows the rules of the round rug by his bed, where his big brother Dylan teaches him what happens to boys who make noise. He knows which cupboard his mother hides things in, and which of her lies he has promised to keep. He knows that telling is the worst thing a person can do.
Then Dylan disappears.
A detective with small silver glasses sits across from J and asks him what happened that night. J gives her the only answer he will ever give, because it is true:
I made him a sandwich.
Narrated by a boy who remembers everything and says only what is true, Don't hit me, mummy. is a dark, intimate literary novel about a family held together by secrets. It is about the violence that passes from parent to child to child, the love that survives inside it, and the quiet, terrible things a child learns when nobody is watching.
Unsettling and heartbreaking, and impossible to put down, it will stay with you long after the last page.
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