BookBrowse Reviews Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

BookBrowse:

An affecting portrait of small-town life in post-war Ohio that follows two intertwined couples over the course of their forty-year relationships.

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Patrick Ryan's novel Buckeye begins in the small fictional town of Bonhomie, Ohio, on May 8th, 1945: V-E Day, the day that Germany surrendered to the Allies in World War II. Cal Jenkins is at work at his father-in-law's hardware store when a beautiful young woman dashes in, asking if he has a radio. He leads her to a workroom in the basement, where they hear the news that the war in Europe has ended and share a celebratory kiss—setting in motion events that will impact them, their spouses, and their children in the ensuing decades.

The novel then backs up to describe each of the protagonists' lives up to that point. We learn that Cal was born with a short leg, which has kept him out of the war, much to his shame. Becky, the woman he'll marry, has been able to communicate with the spirits of the dead since her childhood. Margaret, the beautiful woman in the hardware store, was abandoned at an orphanage as an infant, while her eventual husband, Felix, is a big-city boy, having grown up in Cleveland. The reader discovers how each couple met, and the challenges they've encountered in their separate marriages. When the four stories meet at the inflection point—the kiss—the narrative shifts focus to the war's aftermath and how it impacts the son each couple raises, before concluding in the post-Vietnam era.

Ryan brilliantly captures the atmosphere of a small town, particularly just before and after WWII. He describes Bonhomie with its "grid of nine streets" and neighborhoods segregated by ethnicity: "When people wanted an Irish neighborhood they could point to, they could always refer to the block with St. Catherine's and Good Shepherd School." There's a railway running through town, and "a rusted grain elevator still bearing the checkered Purina logo loomed like a monolith at the east end of Main Street." His depiction of Cal's residence could have been that of my grandparents' home in Northeast Ohio:

"The house on Taft Street had been purchased from a Sears catalogue in 1916 and delivered to its previous owner in pieces, but you wouldn't know that from looking at it. It was a solid, two-story house, plum-colored, with a gabled roof, white gingerbread trim, and wagon-wheel brackets framing the entryway. The backyard was fenced in and had a sycamore and a pair of white birches; the front was planted with hostas and had a young buckeye tree growing in the middle of the yard, just ten feet tall, its autumn leaves bright pumpkin-orange."

Beyond the vivid images he paints, Ryan's talent is in making his readers care about his characters' relatively mundane lives. Nothing truly extraordinary happens to any of them—or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the earth-shattering events they experience are common to many and, indeed, are largely expected (for example, it's not surprising that a character who smokes develops cancer). Through his flawed and conflicted characters, Ryan also explores complex themes such as the importance of family, the complexities of marriage and parenthood, sexuality and infidelity, forgiveness, friendship, and how PTSD impacts those returning from war and those around them.

That's not to say this is a book specifically about any of these subjects. Marital infidelity occurs, for example, but the book isn't the story of an affair, and by the time readers hit that chapter it's a surprise to no one. Ryan instead keeps attention focused on how the characters react to each figurative bump in the road, separately and together, and how each reaction reverberates across time. That's what makes the book so interesting. Does a spouse leave or stay upon learning of their partner's affair? What are the consequences of that decision? The emphasis isn't on a singular event, it's on how those affected respond.

Buckeye is a quiet book without a lot of action; the plot has little narrative arc, instead flowing seamlessly from one decade to the next. As such, some readers may find it slow. But others—perhaps those who, like I did, find themselves completely invested in each of the characters, or those who share my sense of nostalgia for small-town Ohio—will have trouble putting it down.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in August 2025, and has been updated for the December 2025 edition. Click here to go to this issue.