A Key to Treehouse Living - Softcover

Elliot Reed received his MFA from the University of Florida in Gainesville and is currently living in Spokane, Washington.

Powered in part by longing and a need to make odd associations add up, this very appealing novel emplys jellybeans and gypsies, tree forts and rafts, and a character known as El Hondero to trace the odd conjuring that this narrator brings us in on. A memorable debut.--Amy Hempel

Disorienting, weirdly wise, indescribably transparent, impossibly recognizable. Fun, too.--Joy Williams

Huckleberry Finn advanced out of antebellum doldrums into the poetic modern perverse, with the same charm. Subtle, daring, brilliant.--Padgett Powell

Crisp and lyrical, emotionally assured, delightfully inventive--Reed has made a marvelous debut.--Kirkus

Dark yet uplifting . . . This novel's true joy may be the wonder it radiates about a world as beautiful as it is cruel. See 'OVERCOME BY EMOTION.'--Booklist

Inventive, illuminating . . . Reed offers an impressionistic and profound exploration of self and consciousness.--Publishers Weekly

William sets off down river in a Huck Finn-esque journey that takes him physically and emotionally through mystical and awe-inspiring spaces. . . . giving a book about existential darkness an undeniable sense of beauty and wonder."--Shelf Awareness, Starred Review

A Key to Treehouse Living--it's terrific, funny, poignant and just weird enough, transcends that great form. I ate it up.--Jess Walter

A Key to Treehouse Living by Elliot Reed scrambles up all the customary codes of the novel to piece together, at last, the moving story of a lost boy searching out his place in the world. What appears as all indexed coda turns out to be a well-told tale and, more vitally for me, the accumulation of enormous incidental pleasures.--Joshua Ferris

A Key to Treehouse Living is a beautiful book that treats language, family, childhood, and storytelling as flexible, luminous, dangerous things. William Tyce is a narrator as compelling as Mark Haddon's Christopher John Francis Boone and Jonathan Safran Foer's Oskar Schell.--Gavriel Savit