The Amazing Absorbing Boy is a story about a teenage boy named Sammy who arrives in Toronto from Trinidad with little more than 500 dollars and a passion for North American comic books. All he knows about Canada is what he has heard from friends back in Trinidad: that the snow falls in different flavours of shaved ice. He had just lost his mother and had been sent to live with his father, who abandoned the family many years before. When Sammy arrives at the airport, his father gives him a frosty welcome and brings him home to an impoverished apartment where he’s given a piece of foam to sleep on for a bed.

Sammy begins his new life by taking walks further and further from his home and eventually makes acquaintances in a cafe and at the library. He makes sense of new people he meets and his surroundings by seeing them through the schemata of comic books he has read. Some people and situations remind him of comic book characters or events. By filtering his new experiences through this comic book perspective, he is able to understand them. His new acquaintances give him scraps of valuable information that allow him to encode and absorb his new country’s culture and eventually carve out a life beyond his piece of foam on his father’s floor.

Although this book centres on a teenager’s experiences, it could be appreciated by readers of any age. Some writers, such as Stephen King in his novel Salem’s Lot, are able to portray a boyhood mindset in a believable way. By using Sammy’s knowledge of comic books as a bridge to Canadian culture, Maharaj does this as well and consequently the reader roots for Sammy in his journey to succeed. How this teenager tries to parlay his limited assets into achieving his modest goals of attending community college and getting a job, is truly amazing. This novel shows us how a newcomer may see Canada and reminds us that, like Sammy, many newcomers can be as heroic as any comic book character.