One For Sorrow

Barzak's debut novel is a heavy hitter. It's a story of being a teenager in a dysfunctional family, going through the trials of the teenage life, of falling in love and having one's heart ripped out, of being confused about the world and about where you're supposed to be. It's about the emotional roller coaster that is the teenage years, dead friends, first loves, and trying to understand one's place in the world. It's the story of Adam, a fifteen-year-old boy who becomes friends with Jamie, someone much like Adam, but who has been brutally killed. But the longer Adam holds on to his friend, the more he seems to lose his touch with everyone around him. Thus begins an adventure of the emotional and the physical. Perhaps what I most enjoyed about One For Sorrow is the fact that it is different from most everything I have read before. I found the story engrossing and the characters fascinating. I wanted to know from the very start what was going to happen to Adam, what he was going to do to survive it, and how it would all turn out. Essentially, I became emotionally invested in Adam's well being, which is almost always a good thing. I also particularly enjoyed the low-level genre content. The characters took over the story, not the fantastic elements (ghosts, floating out of one's own body, etc.). Most genre work these days is heavily plot oriented, which is great, but it is nice to see some writers pushing the boundaries in the genre. Barzak is certainly pushing the boundaries here by taking genre to a different place from his contemporaries. I found few things to complain about with this book. Sure, it's not perfect. There were times when I literally had to yell at the characters as if they were real people, because they were absolutely driving me nuts with their realistic stupidity. But that's not necessarily a complaint. The only thing I can say might be a problem for some potential readers is that One For Sorrow doesn't pull punches. There's language and graphic scenes of a sexual nature--though not on the same level as erotica. If you're the type of reader that likes stories that sit more on that line of purity, then this isn't a book for you. Neither is it a book for people that like stories where everything is happy, or where the conflict is simplistic or easy on the emotions. One For Sorrow literally goes into the darker points of teenage existence, but not in that "emo" way: it's all disturbingly real and terrifying. These are things to consider when wondering if this book is the right one for you. Then again, I recommend reading it even if you are a bit on the sensitive side; pushing one's boundaries is always a good thing. It's a gloriously complicated story, though. So much so I was rather surprised to find that this was a debut novel rather than a fifth or sixth novel. Barzak has a knack for deep character stories--stories that do what all fiction should be doing: discussing the human. Adam is a character you can root for, because e

After finishing "One for Sorrow," I was unable to read anything else for weeks because Adam McCormick's voice was still in my head. I can't remember the last time a read a story with such a genuine and unique character. Adam is simply unclassifiable, and this is the novel's great strength. Set in small town Ohio, the novel introduces us to Adam, a fifteen year old boy who is at the proverbial crossroads, and yet, there is nothing predictable or expected in Adam's story. His beloved grandmother has recently died, his mother has been paralyzed in a drunk driving accident (the description of which is interestingly lacking in the expected lamenting of social ills), and a his school acquaintance, Jamie Marks, has just been found molested and murdered by the railroad tracks. Adam attaches himself to Jamie's memory/ghost and to the girl, Gracie, who discovered Jamie's body. What happens next, told entirely through Adam's point of view, is decidedly and beautifully unsettling. Adam uses a closet to travel between the worlds of the living and the dead, where ghosts try to steal his words, and Jamie burns memories to stay warm. Real landmarks take on other world significance in ways that are unexpected, and quite frankly, genius. Adam's mind is a complex and wonderful place. He is alternately pensive, poetic, naive, self-destructive, and even cruel. The novel and its characters defy classification. We're confronted with a work that presents the complexities of the human psyche through a character with an extraordinarily high level of emotional intelligence and the lack of impulse control of a typical fifteen year old boy. It's a novel of questions about death and life and sexuality and the intersections of past, present, future. All I can say is read it. "One for Sorrow" is a novel that is thought-provoking and thought-changing. My world view has been forever altered by my time in Adam's mind.

I read this book after reading the Washington Post review of it last year, and really loved it immediately. The voice of the teen narrator was spot on, and the supernatural aspects of the story--the ghost of the dead boy and the little girl from the 1930s, as well as the other dead that wander around in this book--were very eerie and somehow convinced me that, if ghosts existed, this is how they would be. The narrator's family problems, too, were convincing, a sad but sometimes true portrait of the difficulties blue collar Americans face every day. My heart went out to Adam and his family, his friends, his community, both the living and the dead. And recently, while rereading the book, I was heartbroken all over again. This is a sad, spooky, but beautiful and magical book. Read it when you're wanting something different than the usual. Read it when you want to take a dark but hopeful tour through the strange and scary wilderness of the dead.

This book was written by a local author. It was a total surprise to find out we actually had a local author around Youngstown, Ohio, so I was interested to read this and see what Christopher Barzak had to say about the place where I, too, grew up. I was taken with the imagery immediately, the way he captures the blend of Youngstown's urban decay along with the natural world of the surrounding countryside, the sunflowers are a particular real treat, as noted by another reviewer, I see. And the railroad tracks, I might add, the frightening feeling one gets out here on nights when you can go outside and feel as if you're the last soul left alive on earth, and all of the collisions in this book--between drunks, cars, souls, teenagers and adults, social workers and families, psychologists and kids who are too smart and suffer for it. I couldn't put this book down. At no time before in my life had I read a book that addressed this part of the country where I grew up. It was strange and breathtaking to see the foliage and surroundings, the mores and folkways and attitudes and beliefs of the people of this part of the rustbelt given voice. Adam is a rough but also tender narrator. His life is full of darkness and he's seeking the light we are all seeking. I didn't expect the ending to be what it was--somewhat happy, somewhat unresolved, the characters problems almost at the same place where they left off, but maybe with a little bit more hope than before--because usually books either tie everything up in a bow at the end or leave a ton of things unresolved. This felt like a realistic story for me, despite the ghosts and stone hearts that become soft and begin to beat. It reflected what I've seen of life so far, families struggling to stay together and managing to do it even if they get damaged in the process. I don't need or necessarily even want books to reflect the world I already know, but it was really nice to finally come across one that did.

"One for Sorrow" is the story of how fifteen year old Adam McCormack slips out of love with life in small town Ohio, how he runs away from home, finds friends, journeys with one to the Bridge of Death and what happens to him afterwards. The novel has been compared to "The Lovely Bones" and to "Catcher in the Rye". But it has none of the sentimentality of Bones: the teenage ghosts whom Adam encounters - a murdered boy and an abused girl who killed her parents - are real in all their sad and terrifying remnants of humanity. And it has none of the unearned cynicism of Catcher. Adam's working class childhood is ripped away from him and the insight he achieves as a result comes at a real cost. I'm in this book. And if you have ever, even for a day or an hour, felt that your soul had lost its light and your heart no longer beat with this world's, then you're in it too.