Always an Education

Micah Jaeger is just like any other teenager in high school. He is trying to discover who he is and be happy in his own skin. This parents are divorced and he lives with his drunken mother, a strange woman who is obsessed with her dead son. Through a medium named Madam Alberta, his mother discovers that Dylan, Micah’s brother who died in Afghanistan, is supposedly “alive.” To complicate matters for Micah, his father wants to him to be like other boys until Micah reveals he is gay. Add Walker Donnell, whom Micah meets while photographing a dead seagull, and Micah’s life becomes more complicated with the discovery that Walker is intersex.

As always with Reardon’s novels, I learn something. Yachting terminology is explained in a way that landlubber would understand. Micah’s galeophobia, due to a shark biting him when he was young, is tested while yachting with Walker’s parents and overcome when he saves Walker’s cousin Cam from a bull shark. I have watched Shark Week numerous times and always have been fascinated by these hunters. 


Photography has always interested me, enough to become a yearbook teacher for three years, but a new appreciation of black and white photography is introduced through a reference to Vivian Maier. Micah’s photography inspired me to take up the camera again and take my own photos.


Another aspect I learned was Reardon’s inclusion of Muslim customs, which enlightened me on a religion I knew very little about. This is integral to the story as Dylan is alive, married to a Muslim woman who is moving to the States, and Walker’s sister, Paige, was adopted from a Muslim family. Raised a Catholic, comparative religions and mythology forces me to question the differences and similarities.


The characters are memorable and unique, descriptively vivid in my mind. The anxiety the comes with each of Reardon’s novels has dissipated with the resolution she provides the reading, nicely wrapping up each character’s story. And lastly, the Star Trek reference to Anton Yelchin is always a plus in my book.