After reading the book, the movie has come off my Netflix queue entirely. Because if the book is better, I can't take the movie. I knew it was going to be depressing going in based on what I knew about the plot: a young boy is killed in a hit-and-run car accident, and that accident has powerful reverberations on everyone involved. Obviously anything dealing with child death is going to be difficult material, but I used to read those Lurlene McDaniel books about teenagers with cancer on the regular, so surely I could handle it.

Turns out, not really. Not because it was too emotionally charged, but because it was boring and uncentered. The story is told in rotating chapters, varying perspective between Dwight (the driver that hits and kills ten year-old Josh), Ethan (Josh's father), and Grace (Josh's mother). The novel doesn't spend enough sustained time with any of the characters to really dig into them more than on a surface level: Dwight feels guilty, but not enough so to jeopardize his relationship with his own ten year-old son by turning himself in; Ethan feels impotent rage at his powerlessness in the situation, and Grace just withdraws from everything. I did find myself wondering why Grace was written in the third person while the men were written in the first person. Did Schwartz not feel comfortable writing first-person perspective for a woman? Is it supposed to be symbolic of her emotional deadening with grief, that she doesn't even have the willpower to view herself as the center of her own story anymore? I'm honestly not sure. None of the characters grows or changes, everyone just stays stuck in their patterns. Which is probably realistic, I can't even imagine what the process of mourning the loss of a child would be like and hope I never have to know. But it doesn't make for enjoyable or even very interesting reading. ( )

Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "Required some online reviews to recall, but . . . Tale of a hit-and-run that takes a man's son, and his search to find the killer. Suspenseful read." ( )

beautifully-written story about a couple who lose their son in a hit-and-run accident; the guilty driver has issues of his own (guilt, a dysfunctional relationship with his own son, divorced, alcoholism...) the two fathers meet and redemption is found. ( )

The plotting became a little forced to me, but the passages describing how individuals deal with tragic loss and regret make up for it. Some beautiful pieces in a flawed novel. I'll looking forward to reading Northwest Corner (Schwartz's new novel that follows some of these characters). ( )

This was a depressing book. Chapters alternate among the three main characters. It is mostly a psychological look at different ways these characters handled grief. After a 10 year old boy is killed by a hit and run driver, you can imagine the trauma of the parents and then see how the guilt is handled by the hit and run driver, who also has a boy about the same age. I kept wanting more action as I went through the book, but the author makes you wait until the very end before there is any real drama. The story does build and there is suspense as the two fathers get closer and closer to meeting. I rented the movie and was thoroughly disappointed. They changed some circumstances and made it highly unbelievable in my opinion. ( )