Why You'll Love This
A boy called Devil Boy for his red eyes grows up to become an eye doctor — and that irony is the least of what this book does to you.
- Great if you want: a decades-spanning story about faith, friendship, and finding yourself
- The experience: warm and unhurried — then quietly devastating when it needs to be
- The writing: Dugoni builds character through small, precise moments rather than dramatic flourishes
- Skip if: Catholic school nostalgia and faith themes aren't your territory
About This Book
Born with red pupils that earned him the nickname "Devil Boy," Sam Hill grows up navigating a world that sees him as an outsider from the start. Anchored by a fiercely faithful mother, a grounded father, and two unlikely friends who are misfits in their own right, Sam builds a life that looks, from the outside, like quiet perseverance. But forty years later, a devastating loss forces him to reckon with everything he thought he understood — about faith, friendship, and whether any of it was ever truly by design. This is a story about what it costs to hold onto belief, and what it means to lose it.
Dugoni writes with the kind of unhurried confidence that lets character and emotion do the heavy lifting. The novel spans decades without ever feeling rushed, and the structure — Sam looking back on his life with the complicated clarity of hindsight — gives the prose a reflective warmth that deepens as the stakes rise. What sets it apart is how it handles big themes, faith, race, belonging, grief, without becoming heavy-handed. Readers who give it time will find a story that stays with them long after the final page.
