Bone Gap, Illinois, is not a place where one would think to start their life anew. So when Polish beauty, Roza, appears in the O’Sullivan barn battered and bruised, brothers Sean and Finn offer her a place to stay. Soon enough Sean finds love, Finn has a mother figure, and the farm has a matriarch who knows what to do with the soil as well as any farmer in the village. The boys and the farm thrive with Roza’s touch until one day she disappears just as suddenly as she had arrived. Finn is adamant a man took her, but because of certain unusual circumstances he is unable to actually describe the kidnapper.

Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap is a rich novel about losing the ones you love and finding the strength to search for love again. It has characters that are driven apart, yet their bonds remain almost tangible. Sean has a hard enough time being his brother’s keeper since their mother left; he cannot expend more energy into trying to figure out the introverted Finn. On the other hand, Finn wishes he wasn’t a burden on Sean the golden boy, who put his future on hold to take care of him. It is only when the striking Roza enters their lives that the two start to believe they just might make it through after all.

When a young woman goes missing from a small town, only one person questions her disappearance

Ruby begins her novel in the middle of the action and jumps between Roza’s and Finn’s points of view from chapter to chapter. We meet Finn as he is trying to convince the townspeople of Bone Gap to help search for Roza, who — as we find out — is an exchange student out to get experience of the real world at the behest of her grandmother who stays behind in Poland. Ultimately Finn takes on the Herculean feat of looking for Roza himself and in the process befriends his long-time crush, the temperamental Priscilla — aka Petey — who shows him how one can truly see oneself through the eyes of the ones they love.

The situation which leaves Finn unable to describe Roza’s kidnapper has a curious upside: it gives him the ability to see the gaps in Bone Gap. His weakness becomes his strength which leads a way to Roza and her captor. Here, Ruby manages to convey strong emotions with relative ease: when Finn accepts his own self we root for him because the need to be understood as a notoriously misunderstood teenager is a need to which many can relate. It also shows, yet again, that it is during the extraordinary times that we find within ourselves extraordinary strength.

“Finn kept walking. The question Sean had asked him rattled around his brain. Why aren’t you looking for Roza? But the truth was, Finn had never stopped. Right after she disappeared, he got Charlie Valentine to drive him out to the muddy fields where it had happened, and made Charlie wait for hours as he scoured the ground for footprints and tyre tracks, cigarette butts or fast food wrappers — any evidence that the police had missed. He’d endured all of Jonas Apple’s endless, repetitive questions: “Now, I have to ask you if you can describe him one more time. You said he was tall. Tall like you? Tall like your brother? Are we talking six foot two or three or four? You said he was wearing a dark coat. Was that a black coat? Could the coat have been dark blue? Could it have been dark green? Did he have a beard or a mustache? Did he have a beard and a moustache? Never mind how he moved, Finn, I have here that she didn’t scream. Why do you think she wouldn’t scream? Why do you think she wouldn’t kick or run? You think maybe she knew this guy? You think maybe she wanted to go with him? Are you sure?” — Excerpt from the book

As for Roza, like most heroines in young adult novels, she is no damsel in distress. She fights tooth and nail to escape her captor yet no matter what she does, her kidnapper is incapable of being harmed. This is where the story takes a turn into the surreal realm and through this twist Ruby skilfully balances real-life issues of having to grow up faster than you should, with being whisked off into a place of magic and nightmares. It is within these parallel worlds that our hero Finn and heroine Roza are pushed to their limits.

Ruby paints a beautiful narrative with her poetic, elegant prose, and with each phrase the town of Bone Gap and its residents come to life in vibrant hues. She skips gracefully from describing the expansive fields of corn in Bone Gap, to the rolling hills of a Polish village, to the disorienting world of Roza’s kidnapper. She also effortlessly touches upon abandonment in its many textures, whether writing about Sean and Finn’s mother who left them to start a new life, or from Roza’s perspective when she is driven by her grandmother to seek a brighter and more independent future. The sense of loss and the need to replace it with something grander and more purposeful drives the characters to look within themselves and outside of their comfort zone. It is a theme which readers of the young adult genre can relate to in the concept of self-discovery.

It comes as no surprise then, that Ruby’s imaginative book has won numerous accolades as well as critical praise. Bone Gap is a great young adult novel and not-so-young adults will enjoy it for the vivid and engaging prose. The YA genre seems overwhelmed with books about either dystopian worlds or fashion-driven chick lit — this is where Bone Gap comes as such a breath of fresh air; the magical surrealism adds a mythical flavour while the story about a boy and small-town living remains classic in its approach.

The reviewer is a freelance journalist.

Bone Gap
(NOVEL)
By Laura Ruby
Balzer + Bray, US
ISBN: 978-0062317629
345pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 18th, 2016