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    Reservation Road
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    Reservation Road
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    Reservation Road
    Audiobook9 hours

    Reservation Road

    Written by John Burnham Schwartz

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    "Haunting. . . . A powerful and affecting novel."-The New York Times

    A tragic accident sets in motion a cycle of violence and retribution in John Burnham Schwartz's riveting novel RESERVATION ROAD. Two haunted men and their families are engulfed by the emotions surrounding an unexpected and horrendous death. Ethan, a respected professor of literature at a small New England college, is wracked by an obsession with revenge that threatens to tear his family apart. Dwight, a man at once fleeing his crime and hoping to get caught, wrestles with overwhelming guilt and his sense of obligation to his son. As these two men's lives unravel, RESERVATION ROAD moves to its startling conclusion. This is an astonishing tale of love and loss, rage and redemption, that is as suspenseful as it is emotionally compelling.


    From the Compact Disc edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 27, 2007
    ISBN9781415937907
    Unavailable
    Reservation Road

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    Reviews for Reservation Road

    3.5/5

    148 ratings12 reviews

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    • 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
      One summer night, a family is driving home from a concert. They stop at a gas station to use the restroom. In a freak accident, Josh, the ten year old son, is struck by a passing car and killed. The driver is a man hurrying his son back to his mother from a baseball game. He only has visiting hours on Sundays and they are late. In a split-second decision, Dwight, a man with a temper and a checkered history of abuse, decides not to stop. Leaving behind a family broken by grief and loss.The rest of the story deals with the aftermath. Ethan, Grace, and Emma each feel guilty for Josh's death. The guilt drives wedges between them all. Meanwhile, Dwight is truly guilt ridden as well, miserable, but helpless to change his situation. If the truth comes out, he will never see his son again. This novel is gritty in its painfully realistic look at tragedy. It's haunting characters and plot will follow you long after you put the book down.
    • 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
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 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.