This is a short book, but I still didn't finish it. I was too disturbed by the fact that the real author maybe wanted to kill his own son and was using this novel as a way of working through that.
Also, and this is kind of strange, the first few chapters reminded me of Bud, Not Buddy because the narrator in both is a little kid in a terrible situation who's just so darn upbeat about everything. And by "upbeat" I don't mean optimistic, I mean uses a lot of whimsical expression punctuated with exclamation points like "Golly!" and "Gee whiz!