My Name is Anton: A Novel

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

New York Times bestselling author Catherine Ryan Hyde returns with a hopeful novel of sacrifice, two lost souls, and enduring love.

It’s 1965, and life has taken a turn for eighteen-year-old Anton Addison-Rice. Nearly a year after his brother died in a tragic accident, Anton is still wounded—physically and emotionally. Alone for the holidays, he catches a glimpse of his neighbor Edith across the street one evening and realizes that she’s in danger.

Anton is determined to help Edith leave her abusive marriage. Frightened and fifteen years Anton’s senior, Edith is slow to trust. But when she needs a safe place to stay, she lets down her guard, and over the course of ten days an unlikely friendship grows. As Anton falls hopelessly and selflessly in love, Edith fears both her husband finding her and Anton getting hurt. She must disappear without telling anyone where she’s going—even Anton.

If keeping Edith safe means letting her go, Anton will say goodbye forever. Or so he believes. What would happen, though, if one day their paths should cross again?

• ISBN10: 1542023483
• ISBN13: 9781542023481
• Publish Date: 1 December 2020
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Amazon Publishing
• Imprint: Lake Union Publishing
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 364
• Language: English

Reviews

[kimbacaffeinate]

When you read and listen to over two hundred books a year, you don’t always remember the character names and details, but that is not the case with Hyde’s books.

In this story we follow Anton as he helps Edith, a woman, fifteen years his senior, escape her abusive husband. They end up hiding in his family’s flat until the day after Christmas before she leaves town. We watch their friendship grow and witness Anton falling in love for the first time.

When she left Anton hit bottom but it forces him to face his fears, mourn and find himself again.

The story tugs at your heartstrings as we learn about the events that transpired during Anton’s seventeenth year and watch him mourn the loss of Edith before we fast forward to a chance encounter that changes everything.

I laughed, I cried, and I got angry. But more than anything I fell for this sweet, kindhearted young man who deserved all the happiness life can give.

Edith and Anton’s story was touching. At its core, it reminded us that love is love. It doesn’t come in perfect packages or meet everyone’s requirements. The only thing that truly matters is embracing it and making the most of each precious moment.

I adored his grandmother Maron and his Uncle. I wanted to throttle his mother, but Hyde helped us understand and see that not everyone processes life’s hardships and tragedies the same way. As a mother, I can’t forgive her. As someone who has suffered loss, I understood the need to lock it away.

Read it, listen, and gift it to the readers on your holiday list. This review was originally posted at Caffeinated Reviewer

[Jeff Sexton]

Real World Meets Frequency Meets Bicentennial Man. Long ago, there was a situation I was very tangentially linked to (I was a classmate of the survivor) where a boy witnessed his brother be murdered in front of him via a shotgun blast meant for the boy. In the movie Frequency, my singular favorite scene is near the end when the dad in the 1960s uses his shotgun to blow off the hand of the bad guy and you see the hand wither to nothing in the present day timeline. And in Bicentennial Man, you follow Robert Williams' robot character as he lives and loves over the course of two centuries. Literally this morning (as I write this), Catherine Ryan Hyde is using her telescope and camera setup to photograph the known universe, or at least the parts of it she can see from her own small slice of Earth.

This book wound up evoking the first three of these for me in that strange place that resides between my ears, and along the way we get a prototypical character-driven Catherine Ryan Hyde novel. It even included a scene that those that know Hyde even via her Facebook page could see playing out in her real life, making it all that much more "real".

This isn't an action filled book, it isn't even really a mystery filled book. This is a solid character driven moving story about two people thrown together in very unlikely circumstances at a particular point in their lives, who turn out to be very rare types of people themselves. It is a powerful yet relatively sedate story very akin to Bicentennial Man itself.

And sometimes, those are exactly the stories we need to hear. Very much recommended.