Reservation Road

by John Burnham Schwartz

Ten-year-old Josh is killed, a victim of a hit-and-run. His father Ethan saw it happen; his sister blames herself; his mother cannot come to terms with her loss. As the family disintegrates, someone else is struggling to cope with the tragedy: Dwight, himself a father, with a broken marriage behind him, was the driver in the hit-and-run, rushing to get his own son back home on time after a baseball game. As the two stories unfold, Ethan finally works out that Dwight killed his son and goes to his house in the middle of the night with a gun ...This is a powerful and suspenseful novel - accomplished, spare, and incredibly moving.

• ISBN10: 0753807637
• ISBN13: 9780753807637
• Publish Date: 2 September 1999 (first published 25 August 1998)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 27 March 2003
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
• Imprint: Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )
• Edition: New edition
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 301
• Language: English

Reviews

[gmcgregor]

After reading the book, the movie has come off my Netflix queue entirely. Because if the book is better, I can't take the movie. I knew it was going to be depressing going in based on what I knew about the plot: a young boy is killed in a hit-and-run car accident, and that accident has powerful reverberations on everyone involved. Obviously anything dealing with child death is going to be difficult material, but I used to read those Lurlene McDaniel books about teenagers with cancer on the regular, so surely I could handle it.

Turns out, not really. Not because it was too emotionally charged, but because it was boring and uncentered. The story is told in rotating chapters, varying perspective between Dwight (the driver that hits and kills ten year-old Josh), Ethan (Josh's father), and Grace (Josh's mother). The novel doesn't spend enough sustained time with any of the characters to really dig into them more than on a surface level: Dwight feels guilty, but not enough so to jeopardize his relationship with his own ten year-old son by turning himself in; Ethan feels impotent rage at his powerlessness in the situation, and Grace just withdraws from everything. I did find myself wondering why Grace was written in the third person while the men were written in the first person. Did Schwartz not feel comfortable writing first-person perspective for a woman? Is it supposed to be symbolic of her emotional deadening with grief, that she doesn't even have the willpower to view herself as the center of her own story anymore? I'm honestly not sure. None of the characters grows or changes, everyone just stays stuck in their patterns. Which is probably realistic, I can't even imagine what the process of mourning the loss of a child would be like and hope I never have to know. But it doesn't make for enjoyable or even very interesting reading.