The Ballad of Ronan McCoy <\/p>\n
Author: Colin Morgan<\/p>\n
ISBN-13: 978-0-00-876508-8<\/p>\n
Publisher: HQ<\/p>\n
Guideline Price: \u00a316.99<\/p>\n
Colin Morgan\u2019s debut novel is often preoccupied with what people cannot say to one another. Though known primarily for his work as an actor, Morgan brings to fiction an attentiveness to silence and emotional restraint, crafting a bildungsroman that explores friendship, loss and the ways grief can isolate or bind people together.<\/p>\n
Brendan, the novel\u2019s teenage narrator, moves through life at a slight remove from the world around him. School corridors, classmates and even his part-time work at a funeral home feel distant, as though he is observing his own life from somewhere just outside it. <\/p>\n
At home, grief and exhaustion have settled into the everyday of the world around him. His mother, a carer at a nursing home, returns from long shifts only to retreat to bed, while his father belongs to a generation of men who struggle to articulate emotional truths aloud. Still reeling from the death of his grandmother, Brendan finds solace in the company of his best (and only) friend, Ronan McCoy.<\/p>\n
Morgan establishes the boys\u2019 friendship with warmth and credibility. Ronan possesses an ease Brendan lacks and their relationship carries the fierce intimacy particular to adolescence, when friendship can become a shelter against the world. <\/p>\n
After an accident leaves Ronan wheelchair-bound and non-verbal, however, the novel enters more difficult emotional territory. Brendan must confront not only his friend\u2019s altered condition, but his own uncertainty about how to remain close to someone who now seems unreachable.<\/p>\n