The Odd Sea - Softcover

In The Odd Sea, Frederick Reiken provides readers with an unblinking glimpse into a world we would rather avoid. One day, 15-year-old Ethan Shumway puts on his "pond sneakers" and invites his younger brother, Philip, to join him for an exploration of the murky Baker's Bottom Pond. Philip is about to go along for the adventure, but at the last minute is reminded by his perpetually irritated older sister that he has a birdwatching class. Just as happy to go alone, Ethan steps out the door, walks down the driveway, and disappears.

Such is the stuff tabloids are made of. But Reiken's telling is uninflammatory, unsensationalized, and remarkably real. In fact, you may never hear another news story about a missing child without hearkening back to the Shumways' emotions and reactions. Reiken's gaze is so clear and his understanding so perceptive, it is often difficult to believe this is fiction; if it weren't for the strangely soothing, almost ethereal prose, we might be reading a piece of in-depth journalism.

"Almost two years after Ethan vanished," Reiken writes, "we found his shoe. More specifically, his left pond sneaker--a canvas Nike trainer with a large hole in the toe. Halley discovered it in mid-April, while she was raking out a long-neglected patch of ivy, under a lilac tree that stands close to the end of our gravel driveway. Holding the sneaker by its rubber toe, she carried it straight up to my bedroom, where she placed it on the floor. We knew we shouldn't really touch it, so we just watched the thing in silence. I leaned down close and looked inside, although not sure what I hoped to see. The inner sole was black but had white fungus growing out of it. I recall staring hard at this fungus, feeling as if I were gazing at some visible, living form of Ethan's absence."

This beautifully written novel is told through the eyes of Philip, painfully bent on finding clues that will reveal his brother is alive somewhere. His investigations include questioning Ethan's sheep-shearing girlfriend and provocative mentor to combing through his brother's diary. In the process, he chronicles how each member of his family copes with this inconceivable tragedy: his mother thrown into the darkest depths of depression; his father who takes on the precise, labor-intensive art of timber framing; and the sisters left behind--a self-proclaimed bitch, a lovely accessory to Philip's blind hopes, and the youngest girl, whose insight approaches clairvoyance. Ultimately, as Philip comes of age, he must come to terms with Ethan's absence and acknowledge that grief, too, can be a form of love. --Brangien Davis

Every once in a while, a novel opens a magic door into a world that somehow seems more real than the one in which we live. "The Odd Sea" is such a book.

It opens on a sunny, late-spring morning when sixteen-year-old Ethan Shumway walks down his driveway, turns the bend, and vanishes without a trace. A gifted athlete and musician, he leaves a wake of family and friends desperately searching for him and trying to make sense of what has happened. But it is through the eyes of Philip, Ethan's younger brother, that the story of "The Odd Sea" unfolds. Set in the rural hilltown landscape of western Massachusetts, it's a novel like few others in its ability to create tension and suspense around entirely likable characters. Philip's parents and three remarkable sisters will come to seem like old friends, neighbors struggling to deal with Ethan's disappearance in the best way they can.

But it is Philip who will turn your heart: smart, funny, emotionally wise, yet somewhat lost as he grapples with what his family calls the Odd Sea--the unfathomable place where people and things go when they disappear. Philip wandering around "not-finding" Ethan, smelling his insomniac mother's midnight baking, watching his father fall apart and put himself back together. Philip seeking out Ethan's girlfriend Melissa, Philip confronting Victoria, Ethan's equivocal and sexually radiant mentor. Philip observing the world with a savvy that will break your heart, and with a level of feeling that is almost irresistible.