The Boy from the Basement
young adult novel
The Boy from the Basement is a young adult book by Susan Shaw published in 2004.
Plot
Charlie is a twelve-year-old boy that has been forced to live in his basement all of his life. He has no idea what the outside world is like. Charlie has to scavenge for food when his psychotic father goes to sleep, and he must go to the bathroom in the yard. His father brainwashed him into thinking that he deserves the abuse. When Charlie accidentally goes into the outside world, he collapses and wakes up in a hospital. He is then sent to a foster home. With the help of his foster family and a psychologist, he tries to get over his psychological trauma and get used to the outside world. Charlie eventually gets used to the outside world, but still in fear of his nightmares that his dad will one day take him from his foster family. During his time in the outside world Charlie makes a new friend, Aaron, and his foster mother has two new children.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Boy from the Basement” is young adult novel. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Basement, young and adult, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “young adult novel” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7719677. The first chronological checks are 2004.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “The Boy from the Basement”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow The Boy from the Basement primary sources, The Boy from the Basement archive and Basement research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “The Boy from the Basement” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.