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Draper Doyle's life in Newfoundland, circa mid-1960s, is as constrained as it is colorful. Cooped up in one house with various family oddballs, he views the world from the bottom rungs of the ladder. Perpetually harangued by the frigid and imperious Aunt Phil (whose powers of humiliation reach their apex when she displays a pair of his urine-stained underwear on the kitchen bulletin board), and browbeaten by one smarmy, perverse uncle, Father Seymour, the boy retreats into consoling fantasy, fretful ruminations, and the friendship of his only ally, irreverent Uncle Reginald. When Phil employs a weary argument to shame Draper Doyle into finishing a meal, Reginald wonders aloud if bulletins were "being sent to the poor people of South America by the hour, keeping them up to date about what percentage of their food children of the Western world were eating." Draper Doyle is also haunted--literally--by the ghost of his father, a mystery whose painful resolution almost miraculously offers deliverance to both him and his mother.
What is most gratifying about The Divine Ryans is that it moves so effortlessly from the comic to the bittersweet, from the madcap to the revelatory. Johnston's Twainesque aptitude transmutes drollness and hyperbole into something larger: out of his young hero's absurd comic tangles, we sense a subject slowly grasping not only the shortcomings of those who love him, but also their many travails. The book's divine. --Ben Guterson
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Book Description Condition: New. Book is in NEW condition. 0.45. Seller Inventory # 0676971849-2-1
Book Description Condition: New. Vintage Canada paperback. Seller Inventory # 53K000001O00