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    Reservation Road: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Reservation Road: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Reservation Road: A Novel
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    Reservation Road: A Novel

    Written by John Burnham Schwartz

    Narrated by Stanley Tucci, John Shea and Anne Twomey

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A riveting novel of feeling and suspense in which grief and punishment become tragically intertwined.

    At the close of a beautiful summer day near the quiet Connecticut town where they live, the Learner family--Ethan and Grace, their children, Josh and Emma--stop at a gas station on their way home from a concert. Josh Learner, lost in a ten-year-old's private world, is standing at the edge of the road when a car comes racing around the bend. He is hit and instantly killed. The car speeds away.

    From this moment forward, Reservation Road becomes a harrowing countdown to the confrontation between two very different men. The hit-and-run driver is a small-town lawyer named Dwight Arno, a man in desperate need of a second chance. Dwight is also the father of a ten-year-old boy, who was asleep in the car the night Josh Learner was killed. Now Dwight must decide whether to run from his crime or to pay the price for what he did. Ethan Learner, a respected professor of literature at a small New England college, has seen his orderly world shattered in a single moment, yet persists in the belief that he can find the unknown man who killed his son. Behind their stories are those of eight-year-old Emma, who can't stop thinking her brother's death was her fault, and of Grace, who must find the strength to keep herself and her family together, and to be the mother Emma so badly needs.

    In a gripping narrative woven from the voices of Ethan, Dwight, and Grace, Reservation Road tells the story of two ordinary families facing an extraordinary crisis--a book that reads like a thriller but opens up a world rich with psychological nuance and emotional wisdom. Reservation Road explores the terrain of grief even as it astonishes with unexpected redemption: powerful and wrenching and impossible to put down.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 3, 2006
    ISBN9780739343579
    Unavailable
    Reservation Road: A Novel

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    Reviews for Reservation Road

    3.5/5

    147 ratings11 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I remember seeing a trailer for the movie version of Reservation Road at some point, deciding it looked sad but interesting, and throwing it on my Netflix queue (where it lingered for a long time because I was constantly pushing up more interesting-looking things). And then when I came across a cheap used copy of the book, I bought it and figured that I might as well read it, because the book is always better, right?Well, 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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      An incredibly good book although very sad. A story of a couple with two children, a boy and a girl, who stop at a country gas station one night and the boy wanders into the road and is killed by a hit and run driver who also has his son with him who is asleep and not aware of what they hit. You watch the horrible pain that the victim's parents and sister go through and also watch the other driver as he is haunted day after day by what he has done.
    • 3/5
      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).
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      The same hit-and-run death of a child from the viewpoints of the father and of the guilt-ridden driver. Very sophisticated. Handled adroitly.
    • 3/5
      Loved this line in the book..."There are heroes and there are the rest of us. There comes a time when you just let go of the ghost of teh better person you might have been." The ending made me mad!
    • 4/5
      Reservation Road is a heartbreaking story of family love and loss. Told from the perspective of three characters, the parents of a deceased son and the hit and run driver who killed him, it explores these characters exquisitely. These are not bad people; they are simply flawed, as are all humans, and here thrust into circumstances that stress their weaknesses - to a breaking point. The author draws these characters with such empathy that you feel their grief and their struggles, share their fragilities and rejoice in their survival.The ending was a bit unsatisfactory to me, but overall, a fine, captivating story.
    • 2/5
      Well I bought this book thinking it was Revolutionary Road (since there is a movie up for an Oscar), and this was discovered when I got home. So I gave the book a chance! Not the greatest book I have ever read. The book is split into four parts, and the first and fourth parts were OK, but the middle two parts were very boring and forgetful. The book advertised "suspense", but none was found. The author had a real problem relaying the actual grief of the parents who lost their child to a hit and run accident. The sorrow and morose feelings of the attorney (which parts 2 and 3 were to develop) just really did not come across as it should - felt kind of superficial. The "surprise" ending of the book was not really a surprise, as the author did develop enough character development for me to figure this ending about halfway through the book. I really am not into books that people are nearly grieving themselves to death, but feel that if an author is trying to write an account of this sort of situation, he really needs to "pull out the stops" and let it happen......case in point, "Ordinary People" is a perfect example of what I am talking about.If you are looking for a quick read, and shallow plot and characters, this book is for you! Wonder how the movie turned out??? Might be a future rental.
    • 5/5
      A family faces the death of their 10-year-old son in a tragic hit-and-run accident. The perpetrator's already-troubled life comes apart as he tries to cover his crime while coming to terms with what he has done. Very well-done novel depicting realistic families and a realistic view of grief.
    • 4/5
      An outstanding,thought-provoking piece of writing. Told from various points of view, Schultz creates very believable characters who struggle to survive following a heartbreaking tragedy. I read this long before it was conceived as a possible motion picture script, but it is difficult to imagine that it will translate well into film.