In Buckeye by Patrick Ryan, the glossy postcard myth of small-town America is quietly ripped open to show how one impulsive kiss can echo through generations of war, secrecy, and regret.
At its core, Buckeye is about how ordinary people in an ordinary Ohio town learn that the smallest betrayals and kindnesses can shape a whole century of family life.
Ryan turns Bonhomie, Ohio into a living case study in cause and effect, where one VE-Day embrace between Cal Jenkins and Margaret Salt links the Jenkins and Salt families from World War II through Vietnam and beyond.
The novel’s power, for me as a reader, lies in how gently it shows that there is no clean line between private choices and public history.
Ryan’s portrait of small-town America is grounded in careful research into mid-20th-century life, including war bond tours, draft statistics, and the shifting economics of the Midwest, details that show up in scenes like the Japanese miniature submarine hauled to Bonhomie as part of a war bond drive and parked “in front of the courthouse, between two mounds of plowed snow” while townspeople pay twenty-five dollars to climb inside.
The emotional questions the book raises about veterans’ trauma and its fallout are echoed in real-world studies showing long-term psychological and health effects on Vietnam veterans and their families, with PTSD still linked to chronic illness and intergenerational distress decades after combat.
Buckeye is best for readers who love slow-burn literary historical fiction—think Ann Patchett or Elizabeth Strout—anchored in richly drawn, flawed characters, and not for anyone looking for a twisty thriller, high-concept fantasy, or a relentlessly plot-driven war epic.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
The novel is officially titled Buckeye, written by American author Patrick Ryan and published in 2025 by Bloomsbury, with many readers discovering it as a Read With Jenna book-club pick and as a Barnes & Noble exclusive edition.
Known previously for young adult fiction and short stories, Ryan here makes a deliberate step into adult literary historical fiction, and Buckeye has already been praised as “a small-town novel of epic proportions” by writers like Tom Perrotta and warmly endorsed by Ann Napolitano and Richard Russo.
The story takes place in the fictional town of Bonhomie, Ohio, and follows two intertwined families—the Jenkinses and the Salts—from the 1920s through the late 20th century, with the narrative pivoting on the day in May 1945 when Margaret Salt walks into the Jenkins hardware store to hear President Truman announce Germany’s surrender.
That moment leads to a kiss between Margaret and Cal Jenkins, a married shop worker with one leg two inches shorter than the other, and the emotional shockwaves from that choice ripple across marriages, friendships, and the lives of their sons Skip Jenkins and Tom Salt.
Buckeye belongs firmly to the tradition of American small-town sagas, but it feels unusually intimate, because Ryan keeps the point of view close to his characters’ interior lives and lets big historical events—the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s—filter through their kitchens, radios, and supper-table arguments rather than through battlefield scenes.
As a reader, I felt less like I was being marched through a history lesson and more like I’d been dropped into one long, complicated Midwestern family gathering where people keep changing the subject when things get too painful, only for those buried stories to surface again when the next generation comes of age.
Geographically, Bonhomie is a small grid of streets built on post-glacial Ohio soil, once swamp and now fertile farmland, a town that swells with migrant workers during the harvest and shrinks again when the work is over, giving Buckeye a strong sense of place from its opening pages.
Emotionally, it feels like one of those places where “most everyone felt as if they’d laid eyes on most everyone else”, so any secret—especially the Jenkins-Salt secret—can never stay fully buried.
All of this makes Buckeye not just a family story, but also a quiet, persistent chronicle of mid-century American life, from war bonds and rationed gasoline to suburban boom years and the uneasy protests of the Vietnam era.
2. Historical Context
Ryan situates Bonhomie firmly within the sweep of American wars and social change, from the town’s founding in 1857 to the long shadow cast by two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam, so that every family decision in Buckeye seems to sit on top of a wider national fault line.
3. Buckeye Summary
The setup: Cal Jenkins and a crooked start in life
Calvin “Cal” Jenkins is born in the spring of 1920 in the small Ohio town of Bonhomie with one leg two inches shorter than the other, a difference that leaves him limping and keeps him out of sports and, later, out of military service.
His father Everett, a bitter World War I veteran turned junk-collector and hoarder, cobbles together a thicker shoe sole from tire rubber so his son can at least walk more easily. At school, other boys mock Cal’s gait and his odd shoe, but one pious classmate tells him they’re both “unique in God’s eyes” and destined for “a special thing,” a promise that lodges in Cal’s mind without ever quite coming into focus.
Cal’s childhood is marked by loss: siblings die young of influenza and tuberculosis, and his mother Dora dies of illness when he’s nine, leaving him alone with moody, conspiracy-minded Everett, who believes the government betrays its soldiers and spends his days drinking, writing angry letters to presidents, and amassing rusting junk and stray animals on a patch of land outside town.
As a young man, Cal works at a concrete plant, dreams of adventure, and idolizes the boys lining up to enlist after Pearl Harbor. He, too, goes to the recruitment center—but the army doctor takes one look at his tilted hips and uneven stance and rejects him, advising him to try the Civilian Defense Corps. Cal leaves, humiliated, and returns to Everett’s chaotic property to deliver groceries and the disappointing news.
Meeting Becky and building a life
Cal’s life brightens when he meets Becky Hanover, the practical and big-hearted daughter of Roman Hanover, owner of Hanover Hardware. They marry in a modest church ceremony with a tiny gathering of friends, Becky sobbing with happiness as they walk back up the aisle.
During World War II, while many of their peers ship out, Cal serves on the home front in the Citizens Defense Corps as a messenger, patrolling the streets at night in an armband instead of a uniform. Bonhomie is full of war-era paranoia: blacked-out factory signs, citizens pinching ration coupons, and anxious talk of spies. Cal feels keenly that the war “wouldn’t have him,” another reminder that he is out of step with the world’s big events.
Cal and Becky eventually buy a house at 17 Taft Street, where a buckeye tree grows in the yard. Cal becomes indispensable at Hanover Hardware, convincing his old-school father-in-law to modernize stock and bring in big appliances and televisions. The store shifts from old-fashioned hardware shop to bustling appliance showroom, with Cal’s energy and salesmanship driving a profit that silences Roman’s complaints.
At home, Becky begins to discover another calling.
She has always been unusually sensitive to people’s feelings and occasionally hears or senses things no one else does. Gradually she starts holding quiet sessions in the parlor, “sitting” with widows and parents who want to reach lost loved ones. Word spreads.
A traveling writer and self-styled psychic scholar, Casey LaGrange, tracks her down, declares her one of the brightest “psychic minds” he’s encountered, and asks to observe her work for a book.
Becky, however, is caught between the comfort she brings grieving families and the disapproval of the local minister, Reverend Toomey, who warns her that claiming to shortcut God’s domain is an insult to the divine and a “disservice to the living.” She bristles at his condemnation and continues anyway, guided by her own sense that what she’s doing is a form of mercy.
Cal and Becky have a son, Skip, a big, blond, exuberant boy whose presence becomes the emotional center of their lives.
The Salts, the war, and a secret affair
Living elsewhere in Bonhomie are Felix and Margaret Salt. Felix is a reserved, precise man who studied engineering and now works his way up at Tuck & Sons, the big local furniture manufacturer. Margaret, a striking red-haired woman with a sharp eye and sharp opinions, teaches dance and carries a restless energy.
Their marriage is affectionate but complicated. Felix is deeply, quietly attracted to men and tries to bury this side of himself in work and respectability.
World War II upends their lives. Felix joins the navy and is assigned to the destroyer escort Teague. At sea he falls in love with a fellow sailor, Augie. Their love, never fully acknowledged aloud, is intense and hidden, and it becomes the emotional axis of Felix’s wartime experience. When the Teague is torpedoed, nearly all aboard die; Felix survives by clinging to debris in the frigid water and is tormented by guilt that he lived when Augie and the others didn’t.
Back in Bonhomie, Margaret, left alone with baby Tom, moves through life feeling abandoned and angry, dancing as an outlet.
On V-E Day, she ducks into Hanover Hardware to follow President Truman’s announcement on the radio and finds Cal down in the basement office. Overwhelmed by relief and joy, she impulsively kisses him, leaving coral lipstick smeared on his mouth and imprinting a moment of illicit connection between them.
Years later, while Felix is still struggling with his war ghosts and before he finds Becky’s ad in the paper, Cal and Margaret’s paths cross again. A moment of mutual loneliness and longing turns into a brief affair. Soon after, the news that Felix has survived reaches home. Margaret discovers she is pregnant and chooses to stay with Felix, letting him believe Tom is biologically his.
Cal and Becky, devastated by Cal’s betrayal and Margaret’s decision, separate for a time, but their shared history and their love for Skip eventually bring them back together.
Tom grows up as Thomas Aquinas Salt—his middle name chosen by Felix in honor of Augie—never knowing the full story of his parents’ marriage or of his own conception.
Becky’s gift, Felix’s haunting, and the boys’ friendship
Felix lives for years in a state that feels less like grief and more like his new normal: an unending heaviness. He is too afraid of therapy and hypnosis, imagining he’ll be forced to spill forbidden truths about his sexuality and Augie, but a tiny ad in the local paper catches his eye—a small scalloped notice for Rebecca Jenkins, spiritual medium.
One snowy day he brings young Tom with him to 17 Taft Street. Cal, shoveling outside, notices them and feels an unsettling tug of recognition when the boy takes off his trapper hat. Becky ushers Felix into the parlor and sends Tom out to the yard to play with Skip, who is building an igloo. It’s the first time the boys meet.
In the session, Felix gives Becky only sparse details about the Teague and his lost shipmates, trying to avoid naming Augie directly.
Becky, in her careful, plain style, relays messages that cut straight to his deepest fears and desires: the sense that his dead lover loves him still, and that he has to keep “swimming” through life instead of sinking under guilt. The encounter leaves Felix shaken but also, for the first time, tentatively able to imagine living as himself among the living—with Margaret, with Tom—rather than as a ghost among ghosts.
While the adults wrestle with secrets, Skip and Tom become inseparable. They ride their bikes all over town, explore Everett’s junk-strewn yard, and test each other’s courage in abandoned barns and mills.
One day they stuff their pockets with buckeyes fallen from the tree in Skip’s yard, climb a disused smokestack, and fire the nuts with a slingshot at birds, crop dusters, and straight up into the sky, standing below with their eyes closed as the buckeyes fall blindly back.
When it seems they’ve emptied their pockets, Tom grins and reveals both his socks bulging with more nuts. Skip laughs so hard he nicknames him “Buckeye,” a name that sticks for life and eventually titles the book.
The boys are almost like brothers in practice, sleeping over at each other’s houses and, in Skip’s case, calling Tom’s father “Mr. Salt” with easy familiarity. Tom sometimes wakes at night just to check that Felix is still in his bed, afraid of losing him to the kind of absence that already shadows their home.
Generational losses: Everett, Roman, and the changing town
The 1950s and early 1960s bring a slow roll of change and loss. Everett, who has become a kind of local curiosity pedaling his adult tricycle and cart into town, attends Zane Grey book-club meetings with fellow aging veterans while his property fills with junk and chickens.
He dies in a house fire that consumes his hoarded world; Cal arrives to find nothing but a smoking foundation and realizes his father’s stubborn, angry life has ended in a blaze he likely helped cause with his own carelessness.
Roman Hanover dies of a stroke on the hardware store basement floor; Cal, now fully integrated into the business, finds him and quietly covers his body before calling for help.
At the wake, Skip sneaks away with Tom to the basement where Roman’s intricate miniature train layout occupies an entire table. Roman’s trains, town, and papier-mâché mountain now technically belong to Skip—and by extension to Tom, who has shared their magic since boyhood.
Bonhomie itself changes: suburbs and strip malls creep outward, downtown gets a cosmetic facelift, and Hanover Hardware adjusts to the new retail landscape. Amid the churn, Becky’s spiritual practice flourishes, attracting locals and out-of-towners, while also provoking periodic religious backlash.
Cal and Becky’s marriage weathers rough patches—especially after the revelation of his World War II infidelity—but the shared work of raising Skip and navigating their odd family constellation keeps them tethered. Becky, after a brief separation, ultimately chooses to remain in the house on Taft Street with Cal, trusting that forgiveness and daily life can co-exist with the pain of what’s happened.
Skip, Tom, and the Vietnam fault line
By the mid-1960s, Skip is in his early twenties, big-hearted but restlessly drifting from job to job. Cal worries that his son has “no discipline” or focus; Becky defends him and urges patience, reminding Cal that Skip is working and slowly learning to handle his own life, even if he hasn’t found a calling yet.
Tom, two years younger, is more academically inclined. When Skip starts shrugging off “kid stuff,” he passes gadgets like a radio kit and tape recorder to Tom, who painstakingly disassembles and reassembles them, discovering he has a knack for sound and electronics.
Tom goes on to Toledo University, works at the campus radio station, and becomes active in the anti-war movement, covering protests and political events with a budding journalist’s eye.
The Vietnam War, which had once felt distant, becomes a looming presence. Cal and Becky, whose generation experienced World War II as a unifying “good war,” struggle to understand a conflict marked by murky objectives and nightly footage of chaos. They worry about Tom’s draft eligibility, but he’s temporarily sheltered by college.
Skip, frustrated by his patchwork employment and drawn by a mixture of patriotism, fear, and the need to prove himself, enlists in the army. When he comes home on leave after basic training, he’s bulked up with muscle and, for the first time, radiates conviction, even as he admits he’s scared.
There’s a powerful farewell dinner: Skip eats his favorite shepherd’s pie while describing the brutal obstacle course—crawling through barbed-wire mud, scaling walls under heavy gear—while Tom, visiting from TU, talks about organizing a campus “Human Be-In” and anti-war rallies.
The two young men stand on opposite sides of the war politically but aren’t at odds emotionally; Tom’s activism is, in a way, an extension of what Skip once taught him about standing up to bullies.
That night, Skip and Tom retreat to the basement, drink beers among Roman’s trains, and laugh late into the night while Cal and Becky hover at the top of the stairs, listening and wishing they could keep both “boys” there forever, safe in their childhood world.
Skip ships out. Not long after, a telegram informs the Jenkinses that he has been killed during the Tet Offensive, one among thousands of American dead. 1968 becomes a year of almost unbearable grief: national assassinations, riots, the breakdown of political order, all of it felt by Cal and Becky as an echo and amplification of their private loss.
Becky, who has spent years facilitating messages from the dead for others, finds herself unable at first to sense anything from Skip.
She grieves like any other mother—numb, furious, shattered. Only six months later, on an unremarkable Saturday afternoon, does she finally experience a clear, unmistakable connection from her son.
That moment, when it comes, is less about detailed conversation and more about an overwhelming certainty of Skip’s continued love and safety. Looking back, Becky understands that every session she ever gave was training for this: learning to accept death, to understand grieving, and to stay open in case her own child ever reached back to her. After this, she quietly retires from medium work.
The secret revealed: Tom’s real father and Felix’s truth
Skip’s death and the turbulence of the late 1960s strain the fragile lattice of secrets that has held the two families together. Cal, Becky, and Felix know that Tom is biologically Cal’s son and thus Skip’s half-brother. Felix also lives with the knowledge of his sexuality and his long-ago love for Augie, secrets he has kept from Tom and from most of the world while trying to be a good father.
In the shadow of the draft and escalating war, they decide Tom has a right to the truth.
When Tom is home between semesters, they sit him down and, in a series of painful conversations, drop what the book itself frames as a “rock” on him: Felix explains that he is gay and that long before Tom’s birth, he fell in love with a man named Augie on the Teague. Margaret, he says, had an affair during the war and conceived Tom with Cal.
Cal and Becky admit their parts in the deception and confirm that Tom and Skip were not just friends but half-brothers.
Tom’s reaction is volcanic. For him, this isn’t a romantic revelation or a late-in-life nuance; it’s a lifetime of identity being yanked out from under him. He sees decades of lies from every direction—about who his father is, why his mother left, why he always felt half-included in the Jenkins household. In fury and confusion, he distances himself from all of them, leaning harder into his life in Toledo and his political work, effectively going no-contact for a time.
Illness, reconciliation, and new paths
As the 1970s progress, Felix’s long-term exposure to sawdust, fumes, and cigarettes catches up with him. He develops serious lung disease, gradually weakening until basic tasks exhaust him. Lonely and frightened, he attempts to reach Tom with repeated phone calls, but Tom, who now has his own separate line feeding into an answering service he rarely checks, keeps missing the messages.
Cal, who has remained in touch with Felix and feels a quiet moral responsibility toward both men, takes Felix’s address book, drives to Toledo, and shows up at Tom’s apartment unannounced.
Kathy, Tom’s partner, answers the door and recognizes Cal as Skip’s father; she knows the whole tangled story and expresses sincere sympathy for his loss, mentioning that her own cousin died in the Tet Offensive. Cal realizes, with deep relief, that Tom has at least been able to talk honestly to someone about everything.
When Tom arrives home and sees Cal sitting on his couch, he knows exactly why he’s there. After some awkwardness and resistance, he agrees to return to Bonhomie to see Felix. That visit is not a neat reconciliation, but it’s the beginning of one.
Over time, with repeated visits, Tom and Felix talk about the war, about Augie, about fear and desire and survival. Felix doesn’t magically become a brave, out gay man; instead, he becomes a more honest, fully seen version of the father Tom actually had.
Felix eventually dies, and Tom, now an orphan in practical terms, is left with the house in Bonhomie and a web of complicated-but-mending ties to the Jenkinses. He starts to spend more regular time with Cal and Becky, driving down with Kathy from Toledo every fourth Sunday for family dinners that blend memories of Skip with new stories.
Margaret’s return and a fragile forgiveness
More than twenty years after vanishing from Bonhomie, Margaret finds Tom. She appears outside his house one day while he and Kathy are home and asks to speak with him, trying clumsily to cram decades of absence and guilt into a few minutes of conversation.
In a halting confession, she tells him that she herself was abandoned as an infant at an orphanage outside Columbus; she grew up without parents and, in her words, “did to you what my mother did to me.” She isn’t offering this as an excuse so much as a context, but she fears he’ll hear it that way.
Tom stands in the yard, eyes glassy, barely nodding. He says he should go back inside.
Then, suddenly, he steps forward, hugs her tightly, presses his face into her chest, and murmurs words she can’t fully catch—maybe “I forgive you,” maybe “I love you.” She will likely never know exactly what he said.
He then dashes into the house, leaving Margaret alone with the fleeting warmth of that embrace, a small but seismic gesture that suggests forgiveness is possible even if they never build a conventional mother-son relationship.
The ending: Erie, adoption, and what Buckeye really means
By 1981, Cal and Becky are in late middle age. For Becky’s 60th birthday in May, she asks for a simple gift: to return to Huron on Lake Erie, where they went on their wartime honeymoon decades earlier.
The old honeymoon hotel has been turned into a gated community, but Cal finds another place with a view of the water. As they drive north in their Oldsmobile, they reminisce about rationing gas for that first trip, about the five gallons Roman and Ida gifted them as a wedding present, about their parents’ prejudices and eccentricities—Everett firing a rifle at a census taker, Roman proposing to screen would-be residents to admit only “the cream of the crop.” They marvel that they emerged from such parents as intact as they did.
They also grieve afresh that Skip will never be able to look back one day and say the same.
In recent years, they have slowly shifted their hopes of grandparenthood onto Tom and Kathy, who come down regularly from Toledo. During one dinner, Tom tells them he’s gotten a new radio show green-lit at WKML, an interview series called The Salt Mine about unsung local heroes and underdogs—librarians, Vietnam vets, and, notably, young couples who decide not to have biological children because they don’t want to bring more kids into a crowded, unstable world.
When Becky asks what the story is with those couples, Tom glances at Kathy and explains that some of them do want children—they just want to adopt kids who already need parents.
After a moment, Becky realizes he isn’t just describing a segment; he’s announcing a life choice. He and Kathy plan to adopt. Cal and Becky, startled and delighted, eventually grasp that a grandchild is “in the offing,” even if Tom and Kathy refuse to give them a timetable.
On the drive to Erie, Cal jokes that he hopes they don’t wait too long because he wants to live to see his grandchild grow up. Becky points out they might adopt a teenager; he quips that in that case he’ll make the kid mow the lawn.
She retorts that the teenager might tell him to mow it himself, echoing something ten-year-old Skip once said when tasked with mowing, and suddenly their joking is flooded with bittersweet memory. They realize that wherever they go, they carry the whole layered history of Bonhomie, Everett, Roman, Skip, and all the rest with them.
Becky has never resumed her medium sessions since Skip died. She sometimes wonders if the spirits she helped—like Augie, like the men of the Teague—understood all along that part of their purpose was to train her heart.
Years of sitting with other people’s grief taught her what it would take to survive the unimaginable loss of her own child and to recognize his voice when it finally came. Having once longed for evidence from beyond, she now trusts her brief contact with Skip as enough.
The novel ends without a neat bow, but with a sense of forward motion. Tom, once the frightened kid nicknamed “Buckeye” for stuffing his socks full of nuts, is a grown man using his skills with sound and story to amplify the lives of underdogs.
He and Kathy are preparing to adopt, to become the kind of chosen parents he once wished he had. Cal and Becky, having survived war, betrayal, estrangement, and the agony of losing a son, are still together, still driving out into the world side by side.
The title Buckeye gathers all its meanings here: the Ohio state symbol, the literal buckeye nuts the boys once fired from a smokestack, and the nickname that captured a boyhood friendship which turned out to be a brotherhood.
The book’s ending suggests that what endures, beneath all the mistakes and secrets, is exactly what Becky’s years as a medium kept pointing toward: love, however bruised, and the stubborn human will to keep swimming.
4. Buckeye Analysis
4.1 Buckeye Characters
Cal Jenkins, for me, is the emotional anchor of Buckeye: a sweet-natured man born with one leg two inches shorter than the other, rejected for military service in World War II, and left wondering whether he will ever discover his “special thing” in life while the men around him go off to war.
He stays in Bonhomie working at a concrete plant and then in his father-in-law’s hardware store, marries Becky Hanover, and later finds himself both grateful for the safe, steady life he has and resentful of how small it sometimes feels, sorting hinges and cabinet handles while his wife becomes the town’s quietly famous medium.
What makes Cal complex is that he is simultaneously self-pitying and deeply decent; he envies Becky’s sense of purpose and even feels that she “mattered” more than he did to people in town, yet he keeps showing up for his family, grieving in awkward, tender ways after Skip’s death in Vietnam and worrying relentlessly about Tom, the son who isn’t quite his but feels like it anyway.
Becky Jenkins might be the most quietly unforgettable character in the book: a spiritualist who begins by hosting almost accidental séances in the upstairs room of her house, guiding bereaved neighbors like Mr. Timmons and Miss Valenz through their grief, often with “spotty” answers yet a palpable sense of compassion.
Her role as the town medium makes her both revered and resented—Cal is baffled by the strangers hovering around their mailbox asking if she can “locate their grandfather”, while she herself struggles with feeling isolated by a gift that doesn’t always work, especially when the one person she most wants to reach, Skip, stays stubbornly silent after his death.
Margaret Salt and her husband Felix, along with their son Tom—nicknamed “Buckeye” by Skip—form the book’s second family constellation, with Margaret’s early loneliness in Bonhomie, her meals with Cal at a stamped-tin diner, and Felix’s severe, secretive nature deepening the sense that desire and duty are always in quiet conflict in this town.
As Skip and Tom grow from mischievous buckeye-slingshotting boys into a soldier and a campus activist whose paths diverge over Vietnam, the novel’s character arcs naturally open onto its biggest themes: war and conscience, secrecy and honesty, the burdens of parenthood, and what it means to belong to a place that both shelters and confines you.
4.2 Buckeye Themes and Symbolism
War, obviously, sits at the heart of Buckeye, but not in a flag-waving way; instead, Ryan shows how different conflicts—World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—reshape the emotional weather of Bonhomie, from the Korean memorial plaque in the cemetery to the heavy air of 1968, when Dr King and Robert Kennedy are assassinated and Becky and Cal feel as if “the world were scraping at the windows”.
Cal’s childhood friend Sean Robison, whose “unusually tight hamstrings” once seemed like a quirky blessing, ends up shot through the neck in the Hürtgen Forest while reciting the Lord’s Prayer, an image that underlines how randomly bodies are chosen for sacrifice and how survivor’s guilt can linger in those who stay home.
Modern research on veterans and their children backs up the novel’s intuition that trauma doesn’t stop with the person who wore the uniform; long-term studies of Vietnam veterans show persistent PTSD and higher rates of chronic disease even fifty years later, while work on intergenerational trauma finds elevated anxiety and depression in the children of those who served in war.
Equally powerful is the theme of who gets to be a “good” parent, and Buckeye keeps circling back to the idea that love and responsibility matter more than biology: Cal and Becky are devastated that Skip will never give them grandchildren, but later learn that Tom and his wife Kathy plan to adopt, joining the growing number of younger couples who decide not to have biological children and instead “find kids who happen to need parents”.
In a United States where tens of thousands of children in foster care still await adoption each year, that narrative choice feels quietly radical and emotionally honest, and it resonates with contemporary discussions about child-free living and adoption as seen in media coverage of young adults who cite cost, climate change, and a crowded world as reasons not to have children of their own.
Symbolically, the buckeye nut itself—which Skip and Tom use as ammunition in their rooftop games—captures the mix of playfulness and danger running through the story, and Bonhomie’s landmarks, from the hulking abandoned mill to the ever-present tulip-shaped water tower, turn the town into a kind of open-air memory palace where every corner holds a secret.
Ryan’s prose avoids showy metaphor but delivers sharp, precise images—a Salvation Army band “coughing and sputtering like horses” as they play beside the Japanese sub, or Becky picturing herself keeping the boys in the basement “forever, safe, playing with the trains”—that build a mood of melancholy without ever tipping into sentimentality.
Taken together, these character arcs and themes make Buckeye feel less like a tidy moral fable and more like a lived-in chronicle of people trying, failing, and sometimes succeeding to do right by one another over sixty complicated years.
5. Evaluation
For me, the great strength of Buckeye by Patrick Ryan is how fully it inhabits the emotional texture of everyday life—the jokes at the dinner table, the way a crack in a guest-room ceiling can stand in for all the small fractures in a marriage, the late-night TV tears that finally break a man open.
Ryan’s characters almost never feel like types; Cal’s blend of shame and pride about his disability, Becky’s mix of skepticism and faith about her own gift, and Margaret’s frustration at being defined by Felix all felt, to me, as vivid as people I might meet in my own Ohio-adjacent extended family.
I also loved the way history flows naturally through the book: the Japanese sub on tour, the news of Tet and King’s assassination appearing on television, the draft numbers that hover over young men like Skip, Theo, and Tom, all of which echo the real-world statistics about how many American families were touched by those wars.
On a craft level, the structure—moving across decades but returning to key rooms, streets, and faces—reminded me of novels like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge or Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, where the pleasure lies in noticing how people change and how they stubbornly don’t.
That said, Buckeye won’t work equally well for every reader, and even I occasionally felt the pacing sag in the middle sections, where the accumulation of domestic detail can make the plot feel more like a long, steady drizzle than a storm, a criticism echoed by some reviewers who found the “epic” label a touch overstated.
If you prefer fiction where every chapter ends with a cliffhanger or a dramatic reveal, the quiet realism here might feel slow, and the book asks for a certain patience with ordinary days, imperfect marriages, and people who make the same mistakes more than once.
In terms of comparison, Buckeye sits comfortably beside small-town epics like Richard Russo’s Empire Falls or Stewart O’Nan’s novels and has been marketed as “a small-town novel of epic proportions”, but unlike those books it currently has no announced film or TV adaptation—so there is no box-office story yet, only strong early sales, bestseller-list appearances, and a growing chorus of book-club discussions.
6. Personal Insight and Contemporary Educational Relevance
Reading Buckeye as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about war stories and intergenerational regret—your own essay on Saving Private Ryan’s brutal honesty about World War II came to mind more than once—I felt the novel works almost like a case study that teachers could use to talk about how big historical forces filter down into ordinary households.
One classroom angle that seems especially rich is the way Buckeye dramatizes intergenerational trauma: Cal is the son of a First World War veteran, the friend left behind when Sean is killed in Europe, and later the father of a Vietnam casualty, which makes his family an almost textbook example of the “chain” of war-related stress that researchers now track across three or more generations of veterans’ families.
When students read about Becky and Cal watching 1968 unfold on television, feeling that every new assassination or battlefield report “went straight to that part of their minds where Skip’s death crouched”, it becomes easier to connect the novel to contemporary data showing that PTSD and combat exposure in Vietnam veterans are still linked to medical and social problems fifty years on, and that many older vets remain in treatment today.
Another useful classroom thread is to pair Buckeye with media discussions of declining birth rates and the rise of child-free or “child-free-for-now” couples, then look at Tom and Kathy’s decision to adopt as a creative, empathetic response to a crowded, unstable world, set against statistics showing tens of thousands of children in U.S. foster care waiting for permanent homes.
Finally, Buckeye speaks surprisingly well to mental-health conversations that animate books like The Midnight Library, which you’ve written about on Probinism; here, characters wrestle with what-ifs and paths not taken without any speculative device, which could spark discussion about how regret, resilience, and meaning-making work in more realistic fiction.
Used alongside films such as Saving Private Ryan and contemporary reportage about veterans’ struggles with bureaucracy and healthcare, the novel can anchor interdisciplinary lessons in history, sociology, psychology, and ethics, giving students both the statistical overview and, just as importantly, the felt experience of what it means when a war never truly ends for the people who survive it.
7. Buckeye Quotes
Among the many lines that stuck with me, I still hear Cal wondering about his purpose—“Sometimes he wondered if he would ever discover what his ‘special thing’ was—his purpose, he’d decided—especially in the face of a world war that wouldn’t have him”—because it captures that aching mix of luck and uselessness that defines his life.
I also kept returning to Becky’s fierce tenderness when she and Cal listen to the boys laughing over the basement trains, and she realizes she cannot “keep them down there forever, safe, playing with the trains”, a line that feels like the whole tragedy of parenthood in one sentence, as well as to the low-key heartbreak of Cal worrying that he is “killing time with both hands” while Becky, through her séances, seems to matter more to strangers than he does to himself.
8. Conclusion,
In the end, Buckeye by Patrick Ryan felt to me like a quietly devastating, deeply humane small-town epic—perfect for readers of literary historical fiction who care more about people than plot twists and especially for book-club discussions about war, secrecy, and family—so I recommend it wholeheartedly.
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