Assembled from parts, and you can see the seams. I mean that as praise.

These were written separately and stitched together afterwards, the joins are visible, and that's the most interesting thing about the book. Chapter Five is a different animal from Chapter Four. The tutors chapter would stand alone in a magazine. Nothing has been sanded down to make a smooth continuous life out of it, which is honest, because nobody remembers their own childhood as a continuous life.

The prose is doing a great deal and it mostly earns it. I put yellow on 31 sentences, which for me is close to a record; four of those sit in the paragraph about the wet garden path and the shadows lying across it.

Two reservations. The chess problems chapter defeated me and I skimmed six pages of it without guilt. And there's a mode he drops into, roughly every third chapter, where the sentence is being admired by its author while it's still being written. I marked five of those in pink. They're still better than most people's best.

A nine. Read the chapter about the butterflies first if you're undecided; it'll tell you inside ten minutes whether the rest is for you.