If I ever do another Top 10 List of Books, The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood will be on it.

I loved this story of an eleven-year-old boy, earning a scout merit badge by helping out Ona Vitkus, the old lady in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the boy dies (now that I think of it, Wood never gave him a name) and his father, Quinn, steps in to finish out the promised weeks.

The father expects cats and doilies. What he finds is a woman living in a “pleasant and airy” house, possessed of card-trick skills and distant memories of her Lithuanian childhood. And she is really old. We’re talking 104 years old.

Quinn is one of those absent fathers. He divorced Belle, the boy’s mother, twice, and spent years on the road, chasing his dream. Had he been around, he might have had a hard time loving his son, who was quirkier than the oddball humans memorialized in the Guinness Book of World Records —

Farthest distance eyeballs popped out of head . . . Most merit badges earned by one Boy Scout

The boy loved the book, and got the bright idea that, surely, 104-year-old Ona might earn her own spot in its pages.

By the time Quinn meets Ona, she’s working on beating out her centenarian competitors.

Everybody’s grieving something in this story. Quinn laments his missed chances. Belle misses her boy. Ona, speaking into the tape recorder the boy brings along on his visits, tallies up all the people that slipped out of her life. Throw in a crisp-shirted scout master for comic relief and you have a sweet book that rings true on page after page.

Photo credit: sparkle glowplug on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC