Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan ★★★★☆

As the love poured in on social media for Patrick Ryan's Buckeye, I knew that evaluating the best books of 2025 wouldn't be complete without this one in the list. Pile on a "Best Book of the Year" designation from Amazon, and my expectations rose even higher.

Buckeye is a generational novel that primarily traces two families in the small fictional town of Bonhomie, Ohio. Cal Jenkins was born and raised in Bonhomie. After his mother's untimely death when he was only eleven, Cal was loosely raised by a father still carrying the emotional scars from having served in World War I. Margaret Salt is an outsider, a transplant from Columbus who makes her way to Bonhomie as a young adult, when her husband Felix's job relocates him to the small town. Cal's and Margaret's lives become intertwined when, in a moment of celebration upon hearing the news of Germany's surrender on V-E Day in 1945, they share an unplanned kiss that leads to an unexpected connection.

Our four main characters—Cal and Margaret, and their respective spouses Becky and Felix—are all saddled with unshakeable experiences or traits that define their identity. Cal was born with one leg two inches shorter than the other, a small handicap that nevertheless influenced his life in massive ways, preventing him from serving in World War II and diminishing his confidence as a man. Margaret was abandoned as a baby, something she could never fully process and understand, which left her always feeling slightly unmoored an adult, be it in places, jobs, or relationships. Becky Jenkins was a local Bonhomian who never quite fit in, due to her unique "spiritual gift" of being able to communicate with the spirits of the dead, leading most locals to view her as an oddity and an outsider. Lastly, Felix Salt harbors his own deep secrets, forcing him to live a dual life: an outwardly facing persona the world sees, while his true identity is buried away.

War and its impact on both those in battle and those at home is a consistent theme throughout the novel. From Cal's father Everett's descension into drink and conspiracy theories after serving in World War I, to Felix's experience of serving in World War II, to the impact of the Vietnam War on their progeny, all of the characters are impacted by the global conflicts that defined so much of the 20th century. At one point, Cal reflects on the effect of war on his life and the people closest to him:

"He’d spent so much of his early adulthood thinking he’d been truncated in life, because of his leg. Because he hadn’t been able to say he’d served in a war, that great marker of identity. But war had marked his father in a manner that had left him forever damaged... They were the truncated ones—them and countless others who’d gone before and were doubtless to follow, since the world that purported to want peace seemed always to be at war."

The novel is sweeping in scope, spanning more than fifty years, and author Patrick Ryan does an admirable job of peppering in cultural touchstones to ground the reader in the different decades. Music, fads, and historical events all server as markers along the readers journey through time, even as they remain rooted in the small town of Bonhomie.

So is it good? It is. Is it the best book of the year? Not for me. I was consistently interested, but I wasn't riveted to the page. It's a well-rendered study of several uniquely imagined characters, but its purpose lies at a macro level rather than a particularly prominent point of conflict. While there is some tension and level of unknown sprinkled throughout, this is not an edge-of-your-seat page-turner; instead, it plods along at a steady pace and increasingly immerses you into the history and lives of the Jenkinses and Salts. It's a solid novel, but it failed to rise beyond that for me.