“Let’s make a long book that has no plot but will make the reader cry at the end,” is what Monica Wood probably thought when writing “The One-in-a-Million Boy.” The story of an eleven year-old boy befriending a 104 year-old woman, then dying and leaving his distant father to take care of her, reveals unrelatable and unemotional themes of friendship. Plus the plot does not go anywhere.

The distant father, Quinn, comes back in the mother’s life, whom he has divorced not once but twice in ten years. Quinn is a “professional” guitarist, who struggled with connecting with his son, but easily connected with his son’s 104 year-old friend. The whole time, it feels as though Wood is pushing the reader to admire the old woman, even though she is a judgemental and selfish.

In Wood’s book, there are a limited amount of points that actually make sense and are important to the small, shallow plot. Pages are awkwardly filled with descriptions that contradict each other between chapters. Her characters do not change throughout the book until they all suddenly come to understand each other in the last chapters. She writes in a slow shallow way. There is no symbolism or figurative language that makes the book dry.

If you want to spend too long trying to get through a book, and at the end be in tears from how much time you wasted with it, and only find meaning in the final three pages, then go for it, read “The One-in-a-Million Boy.”