"Bone Gap:" Original and Fresh YA Magical Realism

Before I get too far into this, I must admit that "Bone Gap" by Laura Ruby was VERY hard for me to get through.

It's not because this book isn't a book one it's more that I am not a fan of magical realism.  I prefer my reality to stay reality and my fantasy to stay fantasy.  When everything gets twisted together I get somewhat agitated.

But here's the deal -
Ruby's book is original.  It's fresh.  It's lyrical and it has stayed with me.  It was a National Book Award Finalist as well as a Printz Honor Winner and those awards and numerous accolades make sense.

At the center of the story are two brothers - Sean and Finn O'Sullivan who live on their own after a tragic accident that took the life of their father and then the subsequent departure of their bereft mother.  Sean vows to take care of his younger brother, Finn, who is odd even for a small town full of a menagerie of trippy characters.  Finn is often beat up by the Rude brothers and called "Moonface" or "Sidetrack" because of his spaced out demeanor.  His saving grace seems to be that he's beautiful just like his mom.

When a gorgeous Polish woman named Roza suddenly turns up in their barn with injuries and no story, the brothers quickly fall in love with her - one in a romantic way and the other in more of a brotherly sort of way.  When Roza suddenly disappears one year later, no one wants to believe Finn's story that she has been taken by a man whose face he can't describe.  Sean believes that everyone wants to leave them, but Finn knows that they need to find her and save her.

Based on the tale of Persephone who gets taken by Hades into the underworld, the realism of small town life gets tangled with black mares, pomegranate cookies, barren gardens, talking corn fields, and prosopagnosia.  Ruby's own poetic style interspersed with a honey laden, young love story make the novel even more dream like.

I appreciate the craftsmanship of the complexities and layers of this tale.  At it's heart is love and how we view the people that we fall in love with and who love us back, and how that changes the way we view ourselves.  It's also about the interconnectedness of small town life full of gossip and secrets - the gaps we fill with stories and those that we leave open for others to discover, as well as the gaps that sometimes swallow us whole. When Charlie Valentine tries to explain the mysteries of Bone Gap to Finn he tells him, "Because we don't have your typical gaps around here.  Not gaps made of rocks or mountains. We have gaps in the world. In the space of things. So many places to lose yourself, if you believe that they're there.  You can slip into the gap and never find your way out.  Or maybe you don't want to find your way out."

It's quite beautiful when I think about it, but I slogged through the reading of this novel vs. enjoying the tale unfold. At times I thought I should abandon it in favor of the other books in my towering bedside stack.  But I stuck with it, and I'm glad that I did because I keep thinking about the story and the characters, and I want to read more about Persephone.

If you want something that isn't ordinary or expected, with a mystery, a love story, and a modern twist on a mythological tale, "Bone Gap" is going to be your new favorite book.

Stolen: A Kidnapping Tale with a Twist

Lucy Christopher's debut YA novel Stolen (2010) presents a psychological thrill ride in which a beautiful and broken Aussie, Ty, kidnaps teenaged Gemma while she is at the Bangkok airport on a layover and looking for an excuse to escape her parents. After drugging her, Ty transplants Gemma to his home in the Australian desert hundreds of miles from civilization and tries to convince her that they are meant to be together. Ty proves to be a benevolent kidnapper who stalked Gemma from the time she was 10 years old, and wants only to protect her and show her all the beauty of the Australian wilderness. He's beautiful with blonde hair, fire lit blue eyes and rippling abdominals, but something about him repulses Gemma.  It could be the fact that he drugged her and took her 1000s of miles away from the only life she ever knew.  It could be the fact that he created a life for them without her consent.  It could be the fact that he stalked her as she grew up.  It could be that he repeatedly says that he will never let her go.

Maybe since I just saw The Great Gatsby and I have been thinking about To Kill a Mockingbird, something in this kidnapping tale seemed almost romantic. In any other situation, Ty, the pained loner who loves the land and pledges devotion to one woman for his entire life, who only wants to show this woman the beauty of the harsh wilderness around them, who never touches this woman but protects her, who paints and traps snakes during the day, and who seems to know everything there is to know about the Australian desert would be a hero.  In Stolen, however, Lucy Christopher twists the tragic hero and places him at the center of a kidnapping tale. We see Ty's devotion to Gemma, but the connection between the two characters remains uneasy because the motives and the violence of kidnapping underly the entire skewed relationship.  In The Great Gatsby, Jay constructed his lavish empire only to win the love of Daisy and be worthy of her love.  There's a romanticism in that story.  Jay Gatsby endears readers as the tragic hero whose fatal flaw stems from the fact that he did it all for love.  He wanted to repeat the past with Daisy, and he created just the sort of world that would attract her.  In To Kill A Mockingbird, Boo Radley watches over Jem and Scout and protects them from danger, going as far as killing a man to protect them.  In the end, Boo, although creepy and somewhat stalkerish, becomes a hero who overcomes the evil.  Christopher's portrayal of Ty leads even his victim to question him - can she trust him? Should she? Does she have feelings for this man whose motives are twisted and his sense of reality warped? Is he tender or terrifying? Is he calculating or kind? The complexity of the character makes it hard to know which leads to the brilliance of Christopher's work and the well deserved Printz Honor it received.

I loved this book and tore through it in a day abandoning other work responsibilities to be entrenched in the heated story of kidnapper and victim, the wild of the Australian dessert becoming a vivid, living character itself. Gemma's internal struggles, her will to escape, and the overriding seductive nature of her captor, all drew me in from the first page.

It's that lingering question of what really constitutes love? How do we differentiate love from capture? Hero from hunter? Healthy relationships from unhealthy ones? Devotion from deviant behavior? Lucy Christopher presents a character as complex as the Australian landscape he knows so well - dangerous and deadly as well as beautiful and breathtaking.  Ty will make you question your concept of hero and villain and Stolen will make you question what it means to be taken and what it means to be saved.