The Odd Sea [Paperback]

Frederick Reiken (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 13, 1999

A teenage boy is missing. His younger brother searches for him and in the process finds himself. A “haunting first novel that takes a horrifying family calamity and turns it into a form of magic” (New York Times Book Review).

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Describing his elder brother's disappearance, Philip Shumway, the adolescent narrator of Reiken's carefully crafted debut, observes: "There was no story except for the puzzling absence of a story." Ethan Shumway, Philip's idolized, musically gifted 16-year-old brother, simply walked out one spring day into the western Massachusetts woods, and no one heard from him again. This "non-story" sucks Philip, his parents and three sisters into its indefinite possibilities (which the youngest sister calls the "Odd Sea" in a child's unwitting pun on the epic of travel and absence). If this is an ambiguous MacGuffin for a novel of family life and growing up, Reiken aptly balances his narrative between the Shumways' various expressions of grief and obsession and their different means of continuing with their lives. Philip's mother fares the worst (she is hospitalized for depression), and his father shakes up the family business by switching from standard carpentry to the throwback craft of timber-frame construction. Philip goes through adolescence searching clumsily for clues to Ethan's character that would explain his vanishing, until he finds, instead, what it means for his own life. The possibilities surrounding Ethan's fate prove less important than the revelations about his high-school romance with his girlfriend, a budding painter, or his relationship with an older woman who served as his artistic mentor. If Reiken's characters have only so much range on their own, he proficiently arranges the family dynamics around a central, insoluble tragedy with the New England hill country as a well-rendered backdrop. (June) FYI: The Odd Sea won the 1997 Hackney Award for First Novel.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Delta (July 13, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385333382
• ISBN-13: 978-0385333382
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #233,569 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful book about loss, March 12, 2001

By 

J. N. Mohlman (Barrington, RI USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Odd Sea (Paperback)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rare gem, June 1, 2000

By 

Bill R. (Mill Valley, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Odd Sea (Paperback)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazingly good novel, September 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Odd Sea (Paperback)

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.