THE BOY IN THE FIELD

by Margot Livesay

The author Margot Livesay has been on the periphery of my reading consciousness for a while and yet I had never read anything she’d written until The Boy In The Field.  This, her tenth novel, is beautifully written and masterfully crafted, with a haunting story that has remained with me since I finished it weeks ago.  I am always thrilled to discover an author that I enjoy who has written lots of other books for me to explore!

The story line of The Boy In The Field starts with three teenaged siblings walking home from school together who find another boy lying abandoned, bloody and unconscious in a field.  Through their intervention and assistance, the boy survives. How each of the siblings internalizes that experience becomes the focus of the remainder of the book.  Matthew, the oldest sibling, obsesses over trying to find the assailant.  Zoe fantasizes about strange men and starts a relationship with a much older man.  Duncan, who previously hadn’t thought about being adopted, wants desperately to find his birth mother.

Each of these plotlines drew me into the story.  But ultimately, it was Livesay’s exploration of love and what it looks like in its many complicated forms that made the book so compelling.  Relationships are never what observers think they are from the outside.  Love always has more dimensions than we think.  And people are rarely predictable in how or why or who they love.  This is a beautiful book that I  recommend wholeheartedly. (Liz)