One Of Us, Old Boy is an interesting mix of ideas; part a memoir of a mentor that changed its protagonist's life (a la Dead Poets Society) and partially the story of a surrealist artifact that tells its own story (reminiscent in a slight way of the photograph in Back To The Future), it manages to carve out its own path. It's not quite magical realism, but it's close enough for government work, and like the best of that genre it manages to embed its odder elements into a perfectly plausible situation and then transcend that situation through it. I feel like the real antagonist here is the First World War, which is ultimately responsible for the "eleven wasted lives" and the protagonist's mentor's feelings of inadequacy. In that vein, what I would really like to see out of this idea is expansion: I would love to see the stories of the eleven other Lads and their lives and deaths in the trenches of France. As it is, though, One Of Us, Old Boy is an excellent story of youth becoming age, and the nagging feeling of never having done enough to make it all worthwhile. I would read Mr. Shosty again.