A coming-of-age novel with no irony, ambiguity, cynicism, or sarcasm - can it really be?

Tony Early's "Jim the Boy" is a simple and sweet book, quite unusual in that regard, very retro. I kept, at least through the first half, expecting it to get much darker, as that's the way most books, even the young-adult fiction that Jim the Boy so closely resembles, develop a plot. Though some odd things happen toward the end of Jim, it maintains throughout its sweet sensibility. Jim is beloved by his uncles and his widowed mother and there no irony or ambiguity about it. Two crises of a sort beset Jim toward the end of the book and toward the end of his 10th year, as his uncles take him to see his dying grandfather, whom he'd never met, and they take him to visit is friend who's been stricken by polio. What's appealing about the book is the rather cool and indeterminate way that Early treats this material. In a typical "boy's" book, Jim and his friend would be best pals and Jim would help him recover or they'd decide that they could go on a wheelchair hike or that reading was better after all than baseball - but this novel is much more realistic. Jim's friendship is tentative, he doesn't quite know what to say, there's nothing he really can say and he leaves his friend in silence. As to the grandfather, there's no great confrontation or revelation, Jim looks at the old man and then moves on (an echo of the scene recalled early in the book when the grandfather comes to look at the infant Jim - they are two very separated people). At the end, Jim looks at a long vista and worries that the world is so big and he's "just a boy." That's very touching and credible. The book is no great breakthrough in re style or character, but it's a touching small story that deservedly found an audience - why not a movie?