Books: The Odd Sea: Frederick Reiken

In some traceless way, through some unfindable hole in time, childhood vanishes. That’s the haunting, unstated theme of this extraordinarily good first novel. The title is a child’s way of saying “odyssey,” and the voyage at the novel’s core is that of 13-year-old Philip Shumway. One ordinary summer afternoon, Ethan, Philip’s much loved elder brother, walks away from their house and is never seen again. The Shumways–Philip, three sisters and their parents–track him separately into obsession. Philip’s childhood is burned away, cauterized, by the loss, and the half-formed man whose personality coalesces is shadowed and deepened. The story has a dark, dreamlike quality, and author Reiken tells it with no melodrama nor any word out of place.

–By John Skow