Very readable and interesting but it begins with a telling misunderstanding of Kubler-Ross that betrays the homework that was not done that is visible throughout.

This is really a book that explores tensions between important things in life, specifically sanity and madness and science and faith.

The main character, Thomas Rosanoff, is in many ways a product of science. He was raised by a famous psychiatrist who used him as a test subject in writing the manual on childhood development. Thomas became famous as the 'Boy in the Box' and, since he was also studying psychiatry, often dropped his last name in an attempt to distance himself from his famous father.

Faith came into the picture through two sources: his godmother, Sr. Frances, a close friend of Thomas' deceased mother and a doctor assisting the homeless in a rough area in Boston and his girlfriend Amy who comes from a faith filled family who has a brother who is studying to become a priest.

When Amy dumps him, Thomas becomes is desperate to win her back. At the same time, his studies are going poorly and he also needs to find a topic for research that will satisfy his professor and Amy's brother seems to provide a key to combine both needs in his life--although things are not necessarily as they seem to be.

Overall , this is a well written and well researched book. The author includes genuine examples of research into the brain and works these into the story effortlessly.

If I had one criticism of this book it would be that this same care and attention to detail was not shown to the faith/ ritual aspect of the story. There are two parts of faith recited in both a church scene and a baptism scene. The only problem is that these two statements (We believe in the Seven Sacraments and We believe in Christ Everlasting) are not part of the creed or the baptismal rite. It is minor perhaps but for me, it takes away from the overall care shown in the rest of the writing.

Even so, I enjoyed this book. The story certainly kept my attention and the ending was satisfying. Definitely a good read!

The Shoe on the Roof

Attempting to explore religious faith, scientific commitment, mental illness, abuse of power, and the complications of young love, Will Ferguson’s novel The Shoe on the Roof is an ambitious, somewhat schizophrenic mess of a book that nevertheless mostly manages to hold the reader’s attention.

The story centres on Thomas Rosanoff, an unfocused grad student doing research in psychology at Harvard. Thomas’ father is a word renowned psychologist and author whose name Thomas shares, and whose most famous book is an account of young Thomas’ childhood, which was essentially one very long and elaborate psychological experiment. Thomas was The Boy in the Box, a reference to the lab observation conditions in which he was raised. He lives under the shadow of his own strange celebrity, and fight against it.

Thomas, reeling from a breakup with an artist named Amy, whose strong Catholic faith he didn’t share, finds himself trying to cure three men who all believe themselves to be Jesus Christ. His experiment, together with his desperate desire to get Amy back, leads him to all kinds of shenanigans. At one end of the spectrum are comic scenes like the one in which he loses a bet with one of the Jesuses and has to dance naked in Boston Common. At the other end is his investigation into a murderous plot to kill, by lethal injection, homeless people holed up in a Tent City.

All of this makes for a novel that is never boring, but which rings false on several levels. Thomas’ character, early on, is sex-obsessed and immature (and the telling of this part of the story betrays an adolescent concern with details). By the last half of the book, he’s a soul-searcher who has nearly developed a conscience. The transformation, though, is so abrupt as to make him seem like two different characters. Similarly, his relationship with Amy as we know it is pretty much only about sex. It’s hard to believe, as the novel progresses, that he’s now pining for her as his one true love.

The other big flaw in The Shoe on the Roof is its portrayal of religious belief in general and the Christian faith in particular. At almost every turn—from mistaken biblical quotations to an extremely preachy Carmelite nun—the picture of faith feels inauthentic. Ferguson seems to want to give a somewhat sympathetic, or at least balanced, account of Christian faith, but as a Christian reader myself, I never felt like I was meeting real people of faith, but puppets being operated by someone holding a very thick and visible string, who had failed to understand them.

Will Ferguson’s reach is admirable. He has attempted to show us glimpses of several important facets of the human experience, some tragic, while retaining a relatively light, comic tone. Sometimes he succeeds, but for the most part The Shoe on the Roof lacks the ring of truth necessary to make such an effort work.

Canada’s Will Ferguson is known for two things: he’s a humourist and he also wrote a fairly serious suspense thriller called 419 that won the Scotiabank Giller Prize a few years back. Now, the only work of his that I’ve read aside from his new novel up for review here is 419, which I didn’t care for too much. I found that novel to be an over-hyped, bloated mess of a narrative that couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be. (A police procedural? A literary novel? A straight-up thriller?) So it should come as no surprise that I have the exact same opinion of Ferguson’s latest, The Shoe on the Roof. This is a story that is fairly funny, but the yuk yuks suddenly turn in tone on a dime to something more serious in nature. In fact, for what starts out as being a boisterous university campus comedy turns into a murder mystery of sorts. The mix is like oil and water.

The Shoe on the Roof is about a young grad student named Thomas, who has just broken up with his artsy, religion-obsessed girlfriend Amy. Heartbroken, he yearns to earn her back. However, he finds out that her brother has been committed to an insane asylum because he believes that he’s Jesus Christ. When Thomas finds two other men in the city of Boston, where the novel is set, who also believe that they are Jesus, Thomas kidnaps all three and sets up an experiment that, he hopes, will cure Amy’s brother’s mental illness — which he think will renew her love.

Meanwhile, a mysterious figure is going around the city and murdering street people by injecting an overdose of drugs into their system … .

If you felt that short paragraph right before this one is jarring after the description I just gave, you’d be right. The Shoe on the Roof wants to be funny and yet taken seriously. This creates an uneven tone of the novel. And I’ll come out and say it: while most of this novel is enjoyable and may cause an unexpected giggle here or there, by the very end of the book, the threads start to fall apart as the murder subplot comes to the fore. It’s as though Ferguson wanted to take the humor background that he’s known for, and take a bit of the overwrought seriousness that won him the Giller Prize to combine the two strands of his authorial output.

It doesn’t work. The tonality just changed at whim, so much so that you can flip the page and something that seemed as though it were leading to a punchline instead turns into a sob story or a crime scene.

In fact, it’s easier to point out the flaws of The Shoe on the Roof precisely because of its unevenness. For one thing, the book is set in Boston, but the city as a character is so undeveloped it feels as though the author had, say, Toronto in mind and thought to move his locale to an American city to net a U.S. audience halfway through writing the book. It turns out, according to an author’s note at the very end of The Shoe on the Roof, the novel was indeed originally set in Montreal, but the absence of any mental health centers of note in the city led him to choose another setting — though that doesn’t answer the question why characters visit CityTV early on, which has struck me as being a more Toronto thing than anything else.

The whodunit aspect of the book is a disappointment, too, precisely because The Shoe on the Roof spends so little time on it. It feels more like an afterthought, and, in the end, when we finally find out exactly who did it, we aren’t really given any motivation as to why they did it. All in all, by this point in the narrative, the reader probably won’t care as the plot threads come crashing into one another — a problem caused by painting the characters into a corner, and also by not really explaining character motivation. One of the folks populating the novel starts to go mad by the end of the novel, but we’re never given any clues as to why he or she does. Similarly, Thomas, we are told, had a tormented upbringing because he was used as a Guinea pig by his father, a noted psychiatric researcher who shares his son’s name, but we never really get much of the way of details.

At this point, you may be wondering what The Shoe on the Roof does right. Well, as mental illness and religion are two interests of mine, the book is fascinating in how it marries the two subjects together, and dares to ask the question, “Does a belief in God imply that the believer is actually insane?” There’s some good discourse and witty banter on the subject, and wherever you are on the spectrum for a belief in God, whether atheist or devout, you’ll come to find something insightful in this dialogue.

And the book is fun. Even though the novel does collapse, at no point in my reading did I start to regret beginning it and read it through to the very end. There are some fairly funny bits of dialogue — which this book does rely fairly squarely on over exposition — and I kept imagining that this was a movie that was unspooling in my mind. The Shoe on the Roof is fast-paced, zany and wild. That is, of course, when it’s being funny. When the tone takes a turn towards the dour, things don’t quite zip along as they should. Still, the funny to serious ratio is skewed towards the humourous, which makes the straight-laced bits tolerable.

I guess I’m divided on this one. I think, in some ways, this is a better book than 419, even though The Shoe on the Roof probably has a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning the Giller simply because it’s largely a comedy. It has some serious problems, though, as I’ve already outlined. Still, if mental illness and religion are hot topics in your household, and you want to read a relaxing novel that doesn’t force you to expend too many brain cells, this might be a book to try. It may make you forget that you’re reading a book, but it may be quickly forgotten when the back cover is closed a final time, too. This is a trifle, and not much more. Proceed at your own risk to your sanity.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Canada for an ARC to preview and review. I truly enjoyed this book. It is about science, religion, medicine and relationships. It's also a murder mystery. Some of the prose is almost lyrical. Recommended.

Thanks to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster Canada and Will Ferguson for providing me with a copy of this novel in return for an honest review.

The main character, Thomas Rosanoff was raised by a famous psychiatrist, who conducted an experiment on Thomas growing up so that he could write a novel on child development. Thomas, trying to escape the shadow of his father, often drops his last name so he can remain anonymous and not being reminded that he was the “Boy in a Box”.

Thomas, a med student, crosses paths with three men who believe they are Jesus. Thomas decides to help these three men back to reality, until his father takes control and conducts another experiment with these men.
I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and the subtle humour throughout. The primary characters were very well developed with strong personalities and I liked each of them. There was a lot of different storylines going on: the controlling parent; the discussion of the thin line between madness and reality; the science of the mind; and faith. The author did an excellent job of pulling them all together.

DNF so will not be rating or reviewing. Thank you for the opportunity to review this title.

The topic is somewhat disturbing, involving mentally challenged adults. A medical student falls in love with Amy. When she dumps him he discovers her brother is in a mental hospital believing he is God. He thinks if he can help her brother he may be able to win her back.. Thomas finds two more men who also believe they are God and takes them home in the hope they will realise there can only be one God and therefore none of them are God. The twists and turns that develop are written skillfully and keeps the reader in suspense until the end. Will Ferguson has written another novel worthy of awards. I highly recommend this book.

This is a great book about Thomas, a med school student living under the shadow of his famous father and 'experiment' that was Thomas' life growing up. There is a running theme throughout the book about the human brain and psychology practices that I found interesting along with how we treat people with mental illnesses and the connection to mental illness and the struggle with how we help the homeless.

The book debates believing in God as a theory or as a result of synapses in our brain and how we take the things we believe in but don't understand and try to make sense of them.

Overall a great read with like-able characters.

The book has wonderful lines such as:
'Memory is the hotel curtain that never closes. Memory always lets in just enough light to fill the room and ruin your sleep.'
'Memory, after all, is a reconstruction, and even the simplest events become paper-mached with myths as the years go by.'
'To Bernie, Dr. Rosanoff always seemed like a grand marshal waiting for a parade to muster behind him.'
'Marriages might linger like a chest cold, and there are friendships that plod along simply because we forget to cancel the subscription.'

This book begins with Thomas being forced to go to church by his girlfriend, Amy, and then immediately after she takes a pregnancy test that comes up positive. Of course they can't have a baby, and Thomas tells her straight out he knows someone who can get rid of it, and she kicks him to the curb with nothing more than the toothbrush she uses to scrub between the tiles.

A lot of the beginning of the book is spent explaining how brains work. Thomas doing social experiments on his own, then later trying to figure out how the brain perceives god, wondering why that can't be recreated in a lab, and then creating a sort of "God helmet" and doing more experiments to simulate the feelings of religion. He's determined to figure out how it works. His father wants him to make something of himself, lie he did, and he's not going to let everyone watch him fail.

Thomas is curious about those people who think they're Jesus. He's met three of them out of nowhere and it goes along well with his study of religion on the brain. He wants to fix these people, and find out what makes them the way they are while he's doing it. He's found his break. At first he only wants to do it because of the girlfriend he lost, thinks it will win her back. For selfish reasons. But then his scientific curiosities kick in and this story is just so refreshing and different than all the other books I've read lately.

I absolutely loved every bit of this. The ending took a turn I never expected. The characters changed so much throughout the book. It took me a little bit to actually get into it, but once I was I couldn't put it down. The characters are realistic, the story is interesting and I found myself laughing out loud at some of the things I was reading. I'm so glad I read this book. I definitely recommend checking it out if you get the chance.

This was an interesting and different read for me. I though the story was intriguing, and the characters were fun to follow. There seemed to be a lot of different plot lines going on, but I still enjoyed it. If anything, I would recommend reading the book just for the wonderful voice of the narrator. The author is really good at describing situations, and that's one thing I loved about the book. Overall, I thought it was a fun read. I liked the discussion of science, because often authors seem to like to demonize science for explaining all of the "magic in life" away, but I feel like the author didn't do that here.

I had no idea what I would be reading when I started to read this novel, but I have never read anything so engrossing!!
We are brought into the world of Thomas Rosanoff, a medical student, as he pursues medical research and intervention into 3 men who each claim to be God. There were times when I felt curiosity, sadness, grief, frustration, anger, rage, wonder and yes, at times laugh out loud humor. The novel is very cleverly conceived and the medical aspects are well described and treated with respect, helping give added credibility to the novel.

Interesting, Unusual and Provocative
As a psychologist and lover of mysteries I was particularly interested in this book and curious to see whether the author could successfully blend both aspects. I was delighted to find that he could and did so effectively. The story deals with a psychological experiment gone wrong at the hands of a Ph.D. student who is interested in mapping the human brain and determining the neurological facts governing faith, religion and the existence of God.
Ferguson is a good and interesting writer with a wry sense of humour and I often found myself laughing out loud at his dialogues and turn of phrase. He uses good words and creates an interesting mix of truth, science and psychology while skirting real events and the truth about people and events. For example he refers to “the boy in a box experiment” which never happened but is similar to the boy in a bubble event which did occur. This doesn’t detract from the tale but rather lends it an unwarranted element of respectability.
His description of the Ph.D. students is quite clever. While claiming to be interested in brain research they seem mostly motivated by learning how to seduce women and manipulating their professors. They unexpectedly encounter three homeless men each of whom claims to be Jesus Christ. The students are determined to effect a remedy by confronting each of them with their delusional counterparts. This leads to many adventures involving kidnappings, police, nuns, drug dealers, security guards, other homeless people and one of the student’s father who is a psychiatrist.
The plot contains plethora of unexpected twists and turns and you are never sure what could possibly happen next. I enjoyed the book but must confess that I alternated between reading every word and ignoring the detailed discussions about adolescent sexual escapades. The plot is unusual and the premise that there are neurological reasons for religious faith is provocative. It was fun to read and I’m glad I read it.