It’s an invention, but one that drives home irrevocably and elegantly what you’d been feeling as you read but did not fully acknowledge: that there are as many different kinds of pain as there are people.”- Boston Globe

The entire telling becomes an act of empathy. Through prolonged exposure to the girls’ thoughts, O’Nan builds the novel’s tension until it feels like the air right before a monsoon these teens, like all of us, are ruled by their passions, and passions can and do transcend human law. “O’Nan’s great gift is that we want to know more about every person he writes, no matter how unremarkable they seem from the outside. O’Nan understands that at least in the moment, it is for everything.”- New York Times Highly specific to the landmarks of the real Ashaway, but ringing with the universal, Ocean State is a map for the emotional dead ends of America, where kids kill other kids over seemingly nothing. Whereas thrillers tend to use murders as a prurient jumping-off point, the entryway to the reader’s pleasure - that chance to play Columbo or Kinsey Millhone in our heads - O’Nan takes his time, humanizing this story to make the hole where the victim was suitably substantial. In Ocean State, O’Nan is subverting the thriller, borrowing its momentum to propel this bracing, chilling novel. O’Nan is an enticing writer, a master of the illuminatingly mundane moments. Propulsive, moving, and deeply rendered, Ocean State is a masterful novel by one of our greatest storytellers.

O’Nan’s expert hand paints a fully realized portrait of these women, but also weaves a compelling and heartbreaking story of working-class life in Ashaway, Rhode Island.

Watching over it all is the retrospective testimony of Angel’s younger sister Marie, who reflects on that doomed autumn of 2009 with all the wisdom of hindsight.Īngel and Birdy love the same teenage boy, frantically and single-mindedly, and are compelled by the intensity of their feelings to extremes neither could have anticipated. Angel, the murderer, Carol, her mother, and Birdy, the victim, all come alive on the page as they converge in a climax both tragic and inevitable. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the build-up to and fall-out from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. In the first line of Ocean State, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it.

Ocean state