12-year-old narrator sounds just right for novel about a boy

Narrators are generally a versatile lot. But there are limits

Gender isn't too much of a problem. But youth is, especially for a male. A woman can imitate a young voice fairly easily, but few men can regress to a time before their voices changed.

So when producer Paul Ruben was pondering who should narrate a story told in the voice of an 11-year-old boy, he went for the real thing.

The problem was, how do you find someone? Acting prodigies aside, how do you find a kid who can deliver a 7-hour narration of a book based on a Shakespearean play? And, oh yes, Ruben is American and the boy had to be British.

Turns out a British narrator and friend who had just judged a BBC-sponsored competition to find "the Young Voice of Bath" recommended the winner, Andrew Dennis, who just happened to be 12.

Lucky Ruben. On the audio version of Matt Haig's novel, The Dead Fathers Club ($32.95 on CD; HighBridge), Dennis is splendid. For starters, he's a good reader. He'd have to be. But it's so much more. Perhaps not surprisingly, he captures the essence of adolescence - confusion and excitability.

In fact, Dennis does such a good job that, probably like many an adult, I sometimes wanted to tell him to calm down and keep quiet. He'd be shouting, "Dad! Dad!" and I'd reach for the volume knob. Sheesh. What's with this kid?

Well, he's upset.

His father has died, and then his father's ghost comes back to tell him that the car crash wasn't an accident after all. His Uncle Alan - the dad's brother, a car mechanic - had jimmied the brakes to cause the crash. Worse yet, Uncle Alan is putting the moves on Mom. He moves in not long after the funeral and they soon announce their engagement.

Dad's ghost tells Philip that he must kill Uncle Alan before his dad's birthday, just 10 weeks away, or Dad will be doomed to reside forever among "the Terrors." A fate, yes, even worse than death.

Is this for real? Or is Philip unhinged by grief?

Yes, Hamlet is the inspiration here. There are even two characters named Ross and Gary (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern knock-offs), and a girlfriend named Leah Polonius.

You don't need to be a Hamlet scholar to enjoy it, but a working knowledge helps to make the book more enjoyable.

The theme of both is: Just how crazy is this boy who is facing such monumental emotional stress? And what is he going to do about it? How will he get through it?

With all the fancy language of the original Hamlet and the puffery of characters in a time from centuries ago, it's sometimes easy to forget that this is just a kid in a really tight spot.

Naturally, he can hardly confide in any of the adults around him, who are way too cemented in the world as they know it to contemplate the existence of a bunch of dead fathers who have formed a club so they can have their murders avenged.

I can't say how it ends, of course. But I can happily report that Andrew Dennis carries the narration admirably, through to the final, surprising moments.

In fact, having a boy read the novel seems so much better, so much more authentic and vibrant than reading it in print.

But youth has its price. There's a teensy bit of profanity in the book. Before he narrated those parts, Dennis needed to get a release from his mother.