by Mark Massaro

In 1970s Missouri, young Joseph “Patch” Macauley cut through the woods on his way to school and heroically stopped an attempted abduction of his female schoolmate, inadvertently taking her place. This single moment begins the 600-page odyssey that spans the periods of naïve adolescent rebellion to hardened adulthood, grizzled and shaped by circumstance and choices.

The foundation of the story are two precocious and charming wayward youths: “Patch,” a reference to his missing eye, and Saint, a loyal and resolute friend. She, a tomboy, amateur beekeeper being raised by her bus-driving grandmother and Patch, a malnourished misfit with an alcoholic mother, often making wry interjections to adults, embody the disregarded “other-side-of-the-tracks” motif in contrast to others in town. The cultural dichotomies are quickly blurred after his kidnapping because the girl he saved is the rich and popular Misty Meyer, causing his social status to change to hero, leaving Saint to navigate a transformed existence alone.

Once taken, Patch survives in total darkness within his kidnapper’s grim cellar, and within that desolate limbo, he meets Grace — a girl who uses vivid stories, educational lectures, and peaceful ballet, to maintain sanity and identity. Despite the inhumane and dire situation as captives, they grow closer in the dark, with Whitaker writing, “For that one perfect moment they were almost nothing more than two teenagers falling in love” (117). Grace cares for Patch, tending to his wounds after a violent beating from his kidnapper, and she optimistically discusses what their lives will be like after, but once Patch is finally rescued, there is no trace of the tender Grace, the angelic girl who tethered him to sanity.

The ongoing search for Grace is what drives the narrative forward, and we the reader, loyally follow. Is she real or is she a figment of Patch’s imagination? It consumes Patch, as Whitaker writes, “He caught the edge of conversations and heard the shape of her words, the pitch of her laugh. Grace was everywhere and nowhere” (275). Like a toy car on a racetrack, each short chapter constantly propels the plot onward, as Patch and Saint juggle their separate lives as they navigate normal high school moments with their newfound fame in town, and onward into adulthood, which finds Patch seeking Grace through painting his memory of her, while he connects with multiple families in America who have lost their beloved daughters.

A shining aspect of the novel is Saint’s resolute strength as she maintains her identity through social pressure and patriarchal standards, despite her self-admitted awkwardness. Saint must often be reminded that she is lovely, and repeatedly puts the prospect of dating on the back burner so she can do her own investigating into the case. Saint seems to light fires under the adults in her life, pushing them to face their own faith in the justice system and confidence in humanity. One scene that highlights her unwavering tenacity is when she merely sits in the police station every day, serving as a physical reminder to the police that they need to do their jobs.

Whitaker’s attention to imagery and scene is precise and patient, with a focus on images being almost as vital as the dialogue. Readers can hear the crickets in the Missouri nights and feel the judgmental stares from onlookers. In one scene, he writes: “Above, the light was too harsh, the bulb caged behind the black wiring. She smelled it, that captivity, beneath sweat and detergent and vinegar” (308). Whitaker’s prose is dreamy, poetic, and blunt simultaneously, allowing readers to access the environmental tension and the weight of trauma as it echoes through each scene. Even in the total darkness of the kidnapper’s cellar, attention to the other senses is heightened as Patch and Grace feel their way to each other. Whitaker writes:

“Against the far wall there was a rampart as thick as a small tree, and sometimes they sat on it and Grace told him they were facing the Pacific and pointed out bulk carriers and freighters and reefer vessels…She told him sunsets were beautiful because the light took a longer path through the atmosphere so that it could scatter those violets” (107).

It’s within the cruel blackness, with Grace, that Patch finds his strength of character, shedding his defiant antagonism with his inherited plight of circumstance, emerging self-determined and confidently focused.

This is a book that illustrates our connectedness, and how small moments and impulses can change lives; whether in the lives of the protagonists or the minor characters, each decision ripples outward, cementing characters into their lives. The characters evolve slowly as they each come to terms with their subjective situations, falling into adulthood defined by their shared pasts. This story expertly weaves together literary genres ranging from whodunit to coming-of-age to travel narrative to cat-and-mouse pursuit. Emotional weights in this story visit the characters over the decades of their lives, as love, obsession, and guilt, seem to come and go like passing storms on the horizon, always leaving them slightly changed — and more self-actualized, like in any “normal” life. As Saint’s grandmother says, “Sometimes ordinary is more than enough” (271).

A truly remarkable epic that spans decades – a story that deals with how we accept consequences and circumstance without letting them define us.

At six-hundred pages, I was left wanting more.