Ugh, I hated this story sooo much.
Resnick does seem to always have the goal of pulling on the heartstrings. Sometimes he's effective, and makes me feel emotional, but other times I can just see him pulling the strings but I don't really feel the effect. This time I could just see all the emotional cues but didn't feel a thing.
Neither of the parents felt like real people to me. The boy did, but he seemed to be on a stage with stage dressing only rather than with other actors. The dad was a tool but only when he was scripted to be. His change of heart at the end I found entirely improbable, and even when he was being a jerk it just seemed that he was reading the scripts of every other story where this kind of conflict happens mushed into one. The mother was very kindly and likeable, to the point that she just felt like she was scripted to be kindly and likeable, and more of a convenient plot device than person. Worst of all was when the mother suddenly and inexplicably had a lucid moment where she remembers her son and tells husband to act the way that it was entirely obvious the story would make him act by the end by hook or by crook. If his turning moment had been something not so obviously contrived it would've helped, but her suddenly becoming fully lucid just to slap him into shape was such a clumsy method of doing it that it really made me groan. I know Resnick can do better. I've read him do better. This just struck me as lazy.
I found the chime-voice hard to listen to. I understand that EP bought this as a Hugo nom and did what they could with it, but it was hard to find a volume where I could understand the words but where the chimes weren't painfully piercing. Resnick made it so that to do it exactly accurately as the text describes it would be impossible, even the character muses that he shouldn't be able to understand the words at all but somehow does.
The reader did a superb job with the voicework, I hope we see him around the casts in the future.