An interesting tale about a child in telepathic contact with an alien. It focusses on the difficulty of communication between a highly intelligent alien and an average child. The limits of language indeed. It is a quick read. Well worth it. ( )

This is a rather charming, cozy, but ultimately rather toothless tale of a unknown entity communicating with a precocious British child. The best way I can describe it is a Worther's Original from another reality proferred by a grandparent from the 60s whose doing his best and telling a wonderful tale they never quite managed to land and ends up being a bit of a garbled rush of bulletpoints and info dumps as they drift off to a sleep they might never wake from.

I liked it. I thought I was going to love it, but I think I was bamboozled by the absolutely gorgeous narration of Daniel Weyman. There's some great ideas here and potential to do something spectacular, but as it is, despite preceding it by a coupe of decades, it's essentially a less dramatic and funny low budget ET where you never have to see the entity.

I will never not be highly amused and low key creeped put by fathers calling their son's 'old man'.

Ultimately, this was the perfect thing to listen to while doing stimming busy work while unable to sleep. Worth a listen, just don't expect too much and you'll have a pleasant time. ( )

Wyndham is a treasure. It’s like somehow he is always telling two stories at the same time.

I tend to think of classic SciFi being super hard scifi filled with impenetrable words and implausibly humanoid alien species. Chocky is, if anything, the opposite: in fact, it's at least equal part 1950's British domestic comedy. This short novella is fascinating if nothing else as a piece of history. Chocky herself -- an alien that my goodreads notes say Margaret Atwood compared favorably to ET, is a very benign domestic spirit, interested in binary math, drawing, swimming and sustainable energy.

Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of Chocky is that Matthew, the child actually faced with the supernatural being, is definitely not the protagonist. Rather the story focuses on his father's reaction to and coping with Chocky's presence. I think it compares quite favorably to the Riverman, a more modern novel vaunted for the same technique.

Still, 150 mass market paperback pages don't give a lot of space to have much there. Now that scifi has been tread as a path many times in the intervening years, I don't think Chocky aged as well as it could have. It's fun, but not particularly novel or profound any more. ( )

Quietly beguiling story ( )