The Ruinous Sweep

Reviewed by: Brooke Faulkner - McArthur Public Library, Biddeford, Southern Maine Library District

Review Date: October 3, 2018

Review

A badly injured teen, Dono (Donovan) clings to life in a hospital bed, wading through an eerily nightmarish otherworldly existence as he tries to communicate clues about what happened to him - and to his father, who was murdered - to his tenacious girlfriend, Bee (Beatrice). In a thriller that makes particularly good use of alternating narration, readers piece together the backstory of Dono's troubled relationship with his father, who has a longstanding alcohol use disorder, and Dono's struggle to manage the flashes of explosive rage he experiences when confronted with other peoples' bullying or cruel behavior. At Bee's urging, he'd been planning to tell his father he wouldn't visit him anymore, but something went terribly awry, and now two police detectives are hanging around the hospital, asking Bee what she knows. Inspired by Dante's Inferno, Canadian YA author Wynne-Jones tells this story in two parts. He balances Dono's heavily atmospheric internal narrative with plentiful action, ratcheting up the tension as he slowly matches up details between Dono's experiences, including with a gang of drug traffickers, a seemingly unstoppable brute who pursues him through the woods and a woman, seemingly death personified, who tries to seduce him, with the current going-ons in Bee's world. The second part of the novel is straightforward realistic fiction and will elucidate some of the questions from the beginning. This unusual structure will demand patient readers but also presents the possibility of it being paired with its inspirational text in a high school setting. An engrossing and chillingly effective novel filled with characters both monstrous and humane.

Overall Book Score: very good