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Bone Gap | February 11, 2016

by Laura Ruby (Balzer + Bray / HarperCollins, March 2015)

When Roza disappears from her quiet town nestled in cornfields, Finn is haunted by the memory of her kidnapping. He is the sole witness of her disappearance, bearing the burden of not being able to identify her captor. As Finn searches for certainty in the haze of memory, guilt and grief eat away at Finn and his brother, causing them to grow farther and farther apart. Woven within realities of small town America— bullies, rumors, whispers in the corn—are Greek mythology tropes that are easy to miss. The town of Bone Gap is cloaked in the mundane, but the mythological elements of the narrative lend gravity to this chilling coming-of-age story. Everything seems pretty ordinary as far as disappearance stories go, until suddenly it’s not. Magical realism at its finest, this dreamy, nightmare-ish story sucks you in and doesn’t let go. Finn’s struggle to understand himself and prove his worth as he tries to remember what he saw is beautifully delicate and poignant; it’s rare for a male protagonist to have this kind of selfless introspection, and to display the kind of vulnerability that Finn does. Entangled in a simultaneously muted and epic conflict, Finn emerges as an ill-fated hero.

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