Buckeye: A Read with Jenna Pick: A Novel

Bestsellers in this age of over-hyped marketing rarely live up to heightened expectations. Buckeye bucks this trend with its superb storytelling, compelling characters, and deftly woven structure that captured this reader from first sentence to last. I liken the satisfying experience gained from reading this book to that derived from reading Patchett's The Dutch House, Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, and Towles' The Lincoln Highway. Ryan is a brilliant writer, and I can hardly wait to explore his other works.

A lifetime of experiences.

I really enjoyed this book. The character development was great. The story was heart warming. For a book of this length it read very quickly.

This book is one of my favorite books ever. It's a book about very little. And about a whole lot. The story is set in Ohio, starting in the 1920's, through the Depression and the WW2 period, then extends into the aftermath of the War, the 1950's, then the turbulent 1960's and 1970's. I read somewhere that it actually progresses into the 1980's, but there is no specific timestamp on the final scenes that were apparent to me. The meat of the story, is really the period before, during and after the War, and the secret ties between two families in the small fictional town of Bonhomie, OH. The impacts of abandonment, of identity and trying to fit in, loom large, as well as betrayal of hearts, familial and romantic. I loved how the author told the story from multiple characters' POVs, and how the volatile world around them also shaped the story. I learned that author Patrick Ryan was inspired to tell this tale based on his own family - that of his grandmother in a secret relationship that no one knew about or discussed until the main players were long gone. Fascinating. My favorite characters were Becky, Felix and Tom - for their very human reactions to the turns in their lives, and the theme of forgiveness of others, as well as themselves.