Title: One and One Is One
Author: S.T. Byra
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 9781532063633
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 324
Reviewed by: Jake Bishop

Read Book Review

Author S. T. Byra has performed a neat trick. She has found a way to write a modern novel that seems positively Victorian. One can’t get very far within this compelling tale without conjuring images of Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield. The Dickensian flavor is not a function of the environment or the times (which is mostly post World War II), but rather a result of the plot itself, which surrounds its young protagonist with a torrent of woe. And like the best of Dickens, Byra makes it impossible for readers not to empathize with her young hero who seems destined to suffer one abominable event after another.

Grady is a nine-year-old boy who lives on a military base in England with his father and mother. His father is not actually in the military, so Grady already has one strike against him with his schoolmates who see him and his family as civvies (civilians). One afternoon, visiting at a friend’s house, Grady witnesses his mate being physically abused by the boy’s alcoholic father. Then Grady himself is treated harshly and made to walk over two miles home in a raging storm that leaves him fighting for his life. When Grady’s parents rightly report the incident to base personnel, the offending boozer and his family are subsequently transferred. While that punishment was just, it leads to Grady’s schoolmates ostracizing him for being a tattletale. Soon shunning turns to mayhem as Grady is held down and tortured by a group of older, brutal schoolboys. His injuries are so extensive that he is rushed to the hospital where he comes within a hair’s breath of dying. Though the young brigands are captured and punished, as they should be, once again Grady suffers for it. He becomes a total pariah within his school. Without friendships, scarred physically and emotionally, Grady is forced to grow from a boy to an adolescent with only his loving parents and his own fortitude to support him. Just when one thinks that things can’t get any worse, Grady’s mom and dad are killed, orphaning him at age sixteen. He is then forced to forgo an early scholarship to Cambridge when he is shipped off to Chicago to live with his mother’s sister whom he has never met and who turns out to be the equal of any dastardly villain even Dickens could create.

Byra is both a skilled writer and an accomplished storyteller. Her characters are vividly portrayed and quickly understood as either friend or foe. While there is definitely a narrative track that runs throughout her novel, the author simultaneously develops a full- bodied character study of a young man who absolutely refuses to be stymied regardless of the harshness of life that seems to keep assailing him. It becomes virtually impossible not to empathize with the young man who suffers one indignity after another and yet is still able to keep moving forward. By tale’s end he reaches a new stepping off point in his life and readers yearn to know what’s next in this survivor’s trek. Fortunately, the author leads one to believe that there is indeed much more to come in subsequent volumes of Grady’s tale. This reviewer believes most will wait for those volumes with keen anticipation.