Review: Bone Gap by Laura Ruby

Summary

Everyone knows Bone Gap is full of gaps—gaps to trip you up, gaps to slide through so you can disappear forever. So when young, beautiful Roza went missing, the people of Bone Gap weren’t surprised. After all, it wasn’t the first time that someone had slipped away and left Finn and Sean O’Sullivan on their own. Just a few years before, their mother had high-tailed it to Oregon for a brand new guy, a brand new life. That’s just how things go, the people said. Who are you going to blame?

Finn knows that’s not what happened with Roza. He knows she was kidnapped, ripped from the cornfields by a dangerous man whose face he cannot remember. But the searches turned up nothing, and no one believes him anymore. Not even Sean, who has more reason to find Roza than anyone, and every reason to blame Finn for letting her go.

My thoughts

Bone Gap is truly a unique and kind of strange read, even for magical realism and that’s what made me enjoy it a lot but not fully love it. I think that I need to read it again to fully appreciate and completely love it, now that I know everything.

Bone Gap is a very quiet and calm read that might not be for everyone. It has some very important message hidden in its pages though.  For a huge part of the book you don’t really have an idea where this is going and what’s going on. It is kind of weird but it does make sense in the end and it is worth every minute spend reading it.

What fascinated me most was that it covers a topic I’ve never heard of before. I went into this book and thought this was all about a missing girl. There is much more to this story though. At one point in the story, you learn something about Finn that is so very unexpected, at least for me it was. It’s something I didn’t even know existed. Suddenly you see everything that happened in a completely new light and some things make sense all of a sudden and I just wanted to start the book from the beginning again to see all these events with that knowledge.

At the surface this might be the story of a girl gone missing, but it’s really more about those people left behind and not just how they handle that event, but even more so about how they all handle tough situations in everyday life. Even more important, it teaches you about inner values and how people get hurt by ther people judging them for who they are.
What some of these characters have to deal with and the reasons why others judge them made me so very angry and broke my heart.

As for the magic realism in this, I was a bit confused. I knew it would be magical realism but for a long time didn’t see any of it and was wondering where it was going. There is really only something at the end that falls into that category but once I reached that point, I really liked it. It wasn’t anything special but that fit exactly the mood of the rest of the book.

I liked Laura Ruby’s writing a lot. Sometimes I just need these quiet books that make an impression by what they have to say, what message they want to communicate and not by the plot itself. These are the kind of books that make me think. I will definitely read this book again and look even closer for these hidden messages. Bone Gap is one of a kind, a story that is so serene but still manages to shout out loud what it has to impart.