A different person, usually Roza and Finn, tells each chapter with the occasional side character such as Petey and Charlie Valentine, the old man who keeps chickens and hides secrets. There is romance in this novel – Roza and Sean, Finn and Petey, but it’s something that lingers as the mystery of Roza’s disappearance and Bone Gap emerge. It reaches a climax where Finn is determined to set things right, and it swept me along, longing to finish it and find out what had happened. It is Petey, the beekeeper’s daughter, who starts to believe him and befriend him, and their relationship grows over the summer.

Especially when Roza disappears and Finn knows who did it – the man who moves like a cornstalk – but can’t describe his face. Sean drives the ambulance, and Finn is finishing school, but can’t recognise faces: it is a quirk that people in Bone Gap find odd, that they don’t know how to respond to for much of the novel.

Roza appears in Bone Gap, in the barn of Finn and Sean O’Sullivan, two boys abandoned by their mother, and with a dead father, they fend for themselves, finding a way to work together. And it is stranger than you can possibly imagine.īone Gap is a small town in America, where strange things occur to ordinary people. But as we, like Petey, follow the stories of Finn, Roza, and the people of Bone Gap – their melancholy pasts, their terrifying presents, their uncertain futures – the truth about what happened to Roza is slowly revealed. Petey Willis, the beekeeper’s daughter, suspects that lurking behind Finn’s fearful shyness is a story worth uncovering. He knows she was taken, ripped from the cornfields by a man whose face he can’t remember. Finn knows that’s not what happened with Roza. After all, it isn’t the first time someone’s slipped away and left Finn and Sean O’Sullivan on their own. So when young, beautiful Roza goes missing, the people of Bone Gap aren’t surprised. He’d been drawn here by the grass and the bees and the strange sensation that this was a magical place, that the bones of the world were a little looser here, double- jointed, twisting back on themselves, leaving spaces one could slip into and hide…Įveryone knows Bone Gap is full of gaps – gaps to trip you up, gaps to slide through so you can disappear forever.

Synopsis: A masterful and seductive tale of love, magic, regret and forgiveness. Genre: Magical Realism, Fiction, Young Adult

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