The Boy in the Burning House

The Boy in the Burning House (2000) is a fast-paced young adult novel by award-winning English-Canadian author Tim Wynne-Jones. The book follows fourteen-year-old Jim Hawkins as he struggles with losing his father while also trying to uncover the mystery surrounding his father’s death. The narrative explores themes of loss, death, trust, friendship, and resilience. The Boy in the Burning House won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Juvenile fiction in 2001, and the Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Fiction in 2002.

Jim Hawkins is a fourteen-year-old kid from a small Canadian farming community in rural Ontario. As the novel opens, he is dealing with the grief of his father’s absence. His father, Hub, has been missing for a year. From all accounts, his father has most likely committed suicide, but Jim believes that his father is still alive. It is clear that Jim is unable to process the absence and possible death of his father; several suicide attempts by Jim confirm this. Nevertheless, he does step up to the role of supporting his family by helping his mother with the farm. One day, as Jim is dismantling a beaver dam on the property, Ruth Rose changes his life forever. Considered crazy by the townspeople, Ruth also happens to be the stepdaughter of beloved town minister Father Fisher. Ruth has been trailing both Jim and his mother for some time now, so obsessed, it seems that she even has their schedules memorized.

When Ruth finally engages Jim, his world is upended. Ruth has a theory about the disappearance of Jim’s father: she believes that her own stepdad, Father Fisher of the Church of the Blessed Transfiguration, murdered Hub—Jim’s father and Father Fisher’s childhood friend—and is covering it up. Though Jim thinks that her theory is simply part of her “weirdness,” she tells him that she has proof of her stepdad’s culpability; this proof centers on a fire that took place two years prior that connects Father Fisher and Hub, and involved the death of a young man. Jim doesn’t want to believe Ruth, and like the townspeople, feels he has valid reasons not to. Through the testimony of her own stepfather, everyone knows that Ruth has had psychotic episodes in the past. Moreover, she is currently taking antidepressants. She also believes that her stepfather will come after her next. However, the more he listens to Ruth, Jim’s belief that his father did not commit suicide forces him to question the circumstances surrounding his disappearance.



Though Ruth is initially seen as chaotic and untrustworthy by Jim, in time he comes to see her as a solid friend who is far more than the unstable individual her stepfather paints her as. As Wynne-Jones says near the end of the novel, “Suddenly Jim knew what it must be like to be Ruth Rose. To always be under a cloud of suspicion, to never be accepted at face value. As soon as you knew she was under medication, that she had been institutionalized, you could never be sure. And Father had made sure everybody knew that.” Father Fisher’s smear campaign against Ruth is to ensure his own innocence, but by the narrative’s end, his demonization of his own stepdaughter is exposed, and Jim learns the truth about his father’s disappearance.

The Boy in the Burning House is a riveting, page-turner mystery. It was inspired by one of Wynne-Jones’s short stories in a collection titled Lord of the Fries. Critics note that the narrative of The Boy in the Burning House is so appealing because, unlike some of Wynne-Jones’s other novels, it is driven entirely by plot. Wynne-Jones is also the author of multi-award winning The Maestro and Stephen Fair, as well as Blink & Caution, and The Ruinous Sweep. In addition to picture books and novels for children and young adults, Wynne-Jones writes radio dramas, songs, and novels for adults.