Jamie O’Neill is not a typical teenager. He likes the rain and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. He likes to watch videos of lectures delivered by famous mathematicians, and knows the exact number of steps between his house and his school. He’s more than a little pre-occupied by the idea of building a perpetual motion machine because, for reasons only clear to Jamie, he thinks it will allow him to go back in time and meet his mother, who died shortly after giving birth to him. Unsurprisingly, Jamie doesn’t fit in at school. Classmates bully him. The headteacher has no time for misfits and outliers like Jamie, preferring boys with more conventional ambitions and more predictable behaviors.

Fortunately for Jamie, he has a loving father and grandmother, and he attracts the attention of two caring teachers, both of whom have complex lives and pasts of their own. One of them is Tadhg Foley, a woodwork teacher, who encourages Jamie to help him build a currach, a traditional Irish boat.

Elaine Feeney’s second novel could easily have ended up as sentimental and cloying. It doesn’t, largely because she portrays so compassionately how difficult it is to be Jamie. Nevertheless, she isn’t able to avoid entirely the traps she builds for herself. Much of the story’s setup is predictable, and not all the characters come alive from the page. Not everyone fits neatly into the slots the world makes for them, and many need care and affection to find their way. Parenting, and especially the consequences of its absence, is Feeney’s theme and it’s one she studies with a compassionate eye.