A spontaneous moment of connection between two strangers sparks decades of choices and consequences through the turmoil of midcentury America in small-town Ohio. The emotional payoff in Buckeye builds up through the accumulation of life’s ordinary moments over years and years, exploring love, forgiveness, and what it means to build and rebuild a life with someone.

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“The world will always bring you back to perspective, if you only bother to let it.”

In Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye, a spontaneous kiss between two strangers, Cal Jenkins and Margaret Salt, in a small Ohio town on V-E Day in 1945 sets off a ripple effect of choices and consequences that unfold across several decades. While the world is fighting and blowing up, the characters in Buckeye are blowing up their own lives: falling in and out of love, marrying, divorcing, having kids, keeping secrets, telling lies, and dying. But there are no dramatic cliffhangers or plot twists in Buckeye. Ryan uses ordinary lives and long stretches of time to explore, with restraint, what it means to build and rebuild a life with someone.

Buckeye is a character study more than a page-turner. The focus stays on interior lives and character growth rather than action. That choice might bore readers looking for big drama, but it’s what makes the book linger after the last page. As Jess Walter writes in his New York Times review, “Buckeye is a reminder of the deep pleasure of following a cast of characters over their entire lives, through births, deaths, marriages, tragedies and, in this case, hard-won reconciliations.”

The novel is about the hard-earned lessons of love and forgiveness. About the frustrating wisdom of hindsight combined with the inability to change the past. And how to keep going after a mistake that blows everything up, and the steadiness of having someone beside you when life rocks the boat. Ryan captures these truths without sentimentality, showing how people stumble their way toward understanding and forgiveness. The world keeps turning, and the characters keep learning what it means to live with the choices they’ve made.

I’d recommend Buckeye to readers who enjoy character-driven intergenerational novels that give attention to both the small moments that shape a life and the big questions of how people change, settle, and make sense of what they’ve done. This one asks for patience, but it rewards it with depth.