The gone book

A skateboarder in Limerick contends with his long-absent mother's return to town with her new partner and young daughter. The narrative moves between present and past, punctuated by entries from the Gone Book, the secret journal 15-year-old Matt Lynch kept for five years: "Today in school we made Mothers Day cards and they all looked at me…Johnny Tolan even laughed…They never looked at Tara Hayes and her Mam is dead. So it's ok to be dead is it? Dead is better than gone?" The tension-filled scenes between Matt's tightly controlled father, a former alcoholic who attends Alcoholics Anonymous and runs marathons, and his older brother, Jamie, who's gone from excelling at school to spiraling into disordered alcohol and drug use, have a visceral charge, always threatening to veer into violence. Matt's relationship with his best friend, Mikey Chung, who's Chinese Irish (and subtly cued as biracial), has also become strained. Matt, who presents white, has found an escape in skateboarding and has lost a lot of weight; his unkind frustration with Mikey, whom he frequently describes as "fat," is ongoing. Polish immigrant Anna Novak, a fellow skater for whom Matt is clearly falling, is struggling with her mother's health issues. This tinderbox is ignited by Matt's mam's return; her apparent desire to be part of her sons' lives again seems destined for tragedy. This taut, emotionally authentic story told from Matt's naturally flowing first-person perspective features raw, sometimes uncomfortable, language and complex characterization and offers no easy answers. Powerful.(Fiction. 14-18) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.