It Would Have Been Better with *Less* Magic

Bone Gap - Laura Ruby

The people around town called Finn O’Sullivan a lot of nicknames, most of them because of how he seemed so… distracted. Finn had plenty of reasons to be distracted, reasons like being deserted by his mother and the simple fact of being seventeen. But right now, he was distracted because Roza had disappeared: Roza, the beautiful Polish girl who’d just suddenly appeared in the O'Sullivan's barn one morning and had subsequently captured the hearts of everyone in Bone Gap, Illinois – especially the heart belonging to Finn’s older brother, Sean. And then she disappeared, and Finn simply couldn’t describe the man who had taken her, the mysterious man who moved like corn stalks waving in the wind.

Finn also found himself distracted by the beekeeper’s daughter, Priscilla Willis (who vastly preferred the name "Petey"). He thought her beautiful, even though everyone else thought her… strange-looking; homely, even. Petey was, however, the only one in Bone Gap who understood Finn’s distraction and his confusion, perhaps because Finn distracted and confused her, too. 

But Roza was out there somewhere in the hands of the Scare Crow, and Roza wanted to return to Bone Gap even though the man had powers she could not understand holding her back. It was up to Finn to find her again, to rescue her, to bring her back. Quite a quest for a seventeen-year old who owns a magic horse and talks to the corn. Quite a quest, indeed.

I blame Franny Billingsly, who – according to Laura Ruby’s acknowledgment – read the first draft of Bone Gap and told her, “I want more magic.” In this reader’s opinion, what was at its heart a fine little book about life in a small Midwestern town, first love and first loss was diminished by the addition of all the “magic.” Apparently, Ruby liked Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 just a little too much…  It might have helped if there were a little more exposition about the Scare Crow and his magic powers instead of dropping them into the book like a dollop of ice cream on a piece of apple pie. It might have helped had there been hints about the magical aspects instead of them blossoming, full-blown. But neither of those things was true, which makes the magic feel more like it was pasted on the plot than being part of its foundation.

Bone Gap shows loads of promise in its depictions of small-town characters and its loving descriptions of  summer in the Great Corn Desert. There's research, too: like fellow Illinoisian Richard Powers, Ruby draws on the works of Oliver Sacks to explain Finn’s “mooniness.” Her topic is not the distressing symptoms of Capgras syndrome as seen in Powers’ The Echo Maker, but an equally poignant (and rare) condition, face blindness – prosopagnosia.

Sadly, Ruby’s insistence on draping magic over this plot like an old woman’s shawl on a chilly morning blunts the potential of what could have been a fascinating story. More’s the pity: had she not leapt on the supernatural bandwagon, it would have better - with less magic.