The Odd Sea

by Frederick Reiken

Book Overview

"A haunting first novel that takes a horrifying family calamity and turns it into a form of magic."-- The New York Times On a sunny spring morning, sixteen-year-old Ethan Shumway walks down his gravel... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385333382
• ISBN13: 9780385333382
• Release Date: July 1999
• Publisher: Bantam Dell
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Powerful book about loss

The most consistent comment found in other reviews of this book is that "it will stay with you". And it will. "The Odd Sea" is by turns sorrowful and uplifting, but ultimately it is just about dealing. About living one's life in the face of the pain, frequently unexplainable, that comes into every life.As the reader follows Phillip's ongoing, quietly desperate, search for the whereabouts of his lost brother, we see all the characters deal with tragedy in their own way. Eventually, we see Phillip come to grips with his grief."The Odd Sea" is a short novel, with simple, yet elegant, prose. I read it in just a few hours. However, its moving narrative will stay with me much longer; it is one of the best novels I have read in the last five years.

A rare gem

At the heart of this gem of a novel lies a mystery. Sixteen-year-old Ethan Shumway walks down the driveway one spring morning and simply disappears. His family and friends naturally launch an all-out search for him, but what ensues is less of a "search story" than an exploration of the nature of absence and the way absent people and things are carried with us through our lives. The author's empathy for his characters becomes the conduit through which we explore this problem in various stages of grief ranging from to denial, to rage, to heartache, to resignation, and ultimately to acceptance. The level of acceptance varies from character to character, and author Reiken paints an accurate portrait of the spectrum of responses that result for the many vividly realized characters who fill the pages of this book. Ethan's mother, for instance, becomes so depressed she requires hospitalization. His father has something of a spiritual awakening, in which he channels his grief into the lost art of timber frame house building. The teenage narrator, Philip, seems somehow both wise and unconscious; while he eloquently chronicles the varying reactions to Ethan's disappearance, it's his own unwillingness to face the grisly reality of what probably did happen to his talented older brother that comes to affect the reader most. A bit like the narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of Day, Philip's perspective remains limited, though the reader's perspective with regard to what may or may not have happened to Ethan is anything but limited, becoming almost encyclopedic due to Philip's meticulous, even if at times "unseeing" chronicling. Philip's point of view is not quite unreliable, but more an innocent standpoint that both resonates and haunts with its blind spots. Overall The Odd Sea is a deceptively mature work: striking in its understatement, succinct in its complexity, economical yet rich in its presentation. I highly recommend this book.

An amazingly good novel

What a book! I was taken by the description on the back cover. For once I was right to trust my instincts. As soon as I read a page, I could not put this novel down! Reiken's voice is pitch perfect, and the story carries tremendous amounts of emotion while never once becoming sappy or sentimental. The pacing of the novel is so carefully timed that we follow the narrator Philip Shumway through all the stages of loss and we feel everything with him, step by step, and come away with the same quiet, ultimately uplifting resolve. Beautiful sense of family dynamics. Just an absolutely wonderful book that EVERYONE should read.

powerful and haunting ... as all great books are

Some books you fly through and never think of again. There are others that you finish reluctantly, wishing that they would never end. Then, there are those rare few that you put down with a combination of regret and relief. This is one of the last ... a book that moved me to the point of that seeming contradiction. I wanted it to go on forever, yet was relieved to be free of its emotional yoke. A truly powerful book that is destined to haunt with meloncholy each of its readers.

an intelligent & emotionally charged tale

It's rare that a book possesses both the intellectual complexity and the depth of emotion present in The Odd Sea. Yet this book seems to have it all. Most importantly, the characters are strong and the story so compelling that the novel grabs you by page 3 and won't let you go until you've stayed up all night to finish it. The story revolves around a 16 year old boy's disappearance and is loosely based on The Odyssey by Homer. Narrator Philip remarks that his father, a sometimes storyteller, "managed to cover everything: absence, distance, longing, hope, return." So does this book, in ways both moving and profound. The Odd Sea is a masterful piece of fiction. I am tempted to call it "perfect."