It seems I am going to rock the boat with my review, because I didn’t like this book much and everyone else I’ve seen has loved it to itsy bitsy pieces. The people who don’t are usually complaining that it doesn’t hold a candle to The Catcher in the Rye, it’s too porny, or it’s just boring. I disagree with all of these assessments except The Catcher in the Rye charge, but only because I read that book when I was 12 or something and it went completely over my head and I’ve never tried to pick it up again.

This is a good book. I’m not joking, internets! It’s really good, but I’m troubled by some of the parallels I see in it, between the characters, both alive and dead. Also, I never connected much to Adam’s story, whether because my struggles as a teen were just so different that I wasn’t able to really empathize or for some other reason, but it never happened. I felt sorry for him, but never felt the snap of “Yes, this.” like I have with other troubled characters. There was always a strange distance between me and the emotions of this story. Also, I’ll be honest: I don’t believe in ghosts, and because I could never decide whether the ghost was real or a product of Adam’s mental breakdown, I was just unsettled and couldn’t lay into the story. Apparently I can’t handle the ambiguity. It was too real to treat as a ghost story, and therefore for me, a fantasy, and yet I couldn’t shake the fact that it was all too real and therefore, ridiculous, because ghosts don’t exist so how is any of the possible! I demand science to explain this dead space phenomena! Sometimes, I wish I could turn the skeptic in my brain off.

Truth: Adolescence is a difficult time. Growing up, becoming an adult, dealing with changes in body and perspective and the amount of expectation is never easy to deal with, and One for Sorrow introduces us to Adam McCormick, who understands all too well the hardship of being a teenager, trapped between childhood and adulthood with so many paths to choose from. Adam’s future seems grim; plagued by troubled family he sees no joy in, a brother who hurls abuse, parents who fight constantly, and a lonely existence with few friends—where does he turn for brightness, the hope that he’ll come through okay?

Added to the stresses of life in the Rust Belt, the molestation and murder of Jamie Marks shocks the town and Adam even more, a boy Adam felt he might have been friends with. At the same time, an accident that alters the fabric of his family strikes, not unexpectedly, and Adam is thrust into a place he doesn’t understand or feel prepared for.

Soon after, he attaches himself to Gracie, who discovered Jamie’s body, as well as Jamie himself through an act that further alienates him from his family; I think not knowing it makes it have more impact, though I failed to get that impact. I was mostly confused. Jamie’s influence and skewed sort of friendship comfort Adam in the beginning, and instead of the void between child and adult, Adam finds himself between life and death, slipping further and further away from Gracie, his family, and truly, and feelings at all.

This story perfectly captures a place and a time and a family caught in the throes of an unforgiving, changing country. Adam’s father is constantly out of work, and his failures only exacerbate his problems already obvious to Adam and any onlooker. Adam’s mother is in no position to be an emotional support structure for either of her children—for her story is almost a mirror to Adam’s. Both deal with almost parasitic influences, both strange and almost unbelievable, and the book tells the story of how they lose their way and try to find their way out. As much as this is a coming-of-age story, it is also a story about how hardship can strike at any time, because life is unfair and unpredictable, not just being a teenager, and how easy it is to fail and fall, over and over. People can attempt to pull you out, but in the end there is only one person that can successfully do so.

We come to my issue with the book with Adam’s mother, Linda. I mentioned parasitic influences, and feel that although their stories mirror each other as they both struggle with a ghost, or something similar to one, that I was…not angry, but nervous about the fact that for Linda, her anchor was a woman, and for Adam, his was another boy. Jamie is not a healthy influence for Adam, as much as Adam sees he and Gracie’s discovery of him helping him to live after death when he was mostly invisible before. Linda suffers the same in Lucy, and in Lucy’s doting there isn’t a homoerotic charge like Jamie’s interactions with Adam, but… I really fail to have the right words that two relationships between people of the same gender were so strange and convoluted and vaguely uncomfortable for me, especially seeing as how they still felt this way at the end of the story, even given the characters we meet there. It’s a small quibble, and one I can’t explain very well. I have issue with female relationships being framed as automatically fucked up, and women being characterized as parasitic sluts, I suppose—and found the female friendship here pretty gruesome on more than just the level it’s supposed to be gruesome on. It pinged me as such a stereotypical out and I was immediately disappointed that Adam’s story was rich and emotional and Linda’s story ended with “she wants cock! EH OH EL.”

Boring. Predictable. The only redeeming feature was Linda herself, and the resolution to her personal story.

Regardless, this is a true story, a sad story, honest and gripping. Is it a ghost story or is the ghost a representation of something else, something inside Adam? I couldn’t decide, but maybe that’s the point. The writing is excellent, the sense of place immediate and almost tactile in the prose. The backdrop against suffering rural Ohio is a stark landscape where Barzak draws a starker picture yet of a family in turmoil, beset by their own failures and a world so unfair and unforgiving that Adam eventually runs away with Jamie to the end, giving up on his ties to the living who have so let him down, becoming more and more ghost-like. Adam’s choice is to whether to find a way through the middle, to choose life or death—to choose whether to accept life, and the terror and the unknown, just as Jamie must accept death, and the terror and the unknown.

One for Sorrow is bleak, but in the end its message is one of hope, through the good times and the bad, and how it will always be there, even if we fall prey to weakness, or loneliness, and perhaps especially, the failures of other people. It was an interesting read regardless of my issues with it; recommended if psychological stories are an interest.

1. things mean a lot