Bone Gap is a twisting story that keeps you coming back for more. Fin O’Sullivan and his brother Sean can’t seem to keep the women in their lives around. First abandoned by their mother and second by a girl everyone thought Sean would marry, Roza. Roza was a Polish girl who had shown up in their barn and was bruised all over. Roza had lots of past trauma and she was healing. Until she was gone. At least, everyone but Fin thought she abandoned them. Fin thought that she was taken. Taken by a man who was average, but his body moved like the corn in the fields of their town of Bone Gap. No matter how many times he was asked to describe the man, Fin couldn’t seem to give a firm description. No one believed him and so he got nicknames like Moonface, Spaceman, and Sidetrack. Not even Sean would believe him and their relationship became very strained. Fin started falling for a girl, Priscilla Willis, though she liked to be called Petey. When someone left a horse in Fin’s barn, he started riding it every night and let the horse go wherever she wanted. But she always took him to Petey’s house. Petey and Fin started spending more time together and Fin told her about his’s thoughts on Roza going missing. She told him she believed him, but did she really? One day whilst bringing a chicken back to the man acrossed the road, he met the man again. Still average, still moving like the corn, still unidentifiable for Fin. And yet again, no one believed him. As time goes by, Priscilla began to notice odd things about Fin. How he couldn’t look people in the eye, he didn’t always recognize people he knew, and a couple other odd instances. When Fin got hurt and was in the hospital, Petey snooped around his house and began putting together the pieces of the puzzle she had. With what she learned about Fin, things started to come together and she began understanding him far more.
I really enjoyed this book. I enjoyed the writing style and I especially enjoyed how Laura Ruby presented the story. On occasion it got a little confusing because it switched points of view between Fin and Roza. Sometimes I wouldn’t quite get Roza’s part but after reading more, I would see what had happened then and how it contributed to the storyline. I think that quite a few different people would enjoy this. There is no overpowering magical element that makes this a fantasy book nor is it a realistic fiction. I would say that this would probably be better for an older/more mature teenage audience but other than that I think lots of people could like this book.
Bone Gap won the Printz Award in 2016. The Michael L. Printz Award annually honors the best books for teens, entirely based upon it’s literary merit each year. I genuinely believe that Bone Gap deserved this award. I think that the book was really eloquently written and the vocabulary used made for an incredibly enjoyable reading experience.