Boneyard - by Stephen Beachy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Jake Yoder, a precocious boy caught between Amish culture and the modern world, sits in his sixth-grade classroom writing stories at the behest of a stern but charismatic teacher. His stories feature children who are crushed, imprisoned, and distorted, yet flailing around with a kind of bedazzled awe, trying to find their way out. His characters traverse South American plains, fenced-in farms, exotic cities; find themselves in mental institutions, one-room schoolhouses, prisons; his sentences appear constructed to the beat of an obsessive internal rhythm.

The disturbing shifts in Jake's tales and their strange internal logic reveal a young boy processing emotional experiences in the wake of his mother's suicide and his own proximity to the schoolroom shootings at Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, in 2006. Jake imagines fantastic journeys, magical transformations, and rock stardom as alternatives, it seems, to his own grim reality and the limitations of his life among the Amish.

What emerges is "a twisty, turny, funny, damning fairy tale that happened -neither long ago nor far away but every day and here" (Rebecca Brown).

Review Quotes

"Stephen Beachy is a complete visionary, a sorcerer, a secret weapon." - Scott Heim

"boneyard is about how we stare at people, especially children, wanting to freeze them into figures we can possess, reform, make into what we want. It's also about how we present our selves to others, shiftily and slyly, that is, lyingly, as creatures we think they'll want, and about our culture's obsession with victimhood." - Rebecca Brown

"Mythic, manic, and amazing." - Michael Lowenthal

"A horrifically alluring monster under the bed. Existentially profound and emotionally dangerous, this is a text that will make you surrender to the extremes of the unnameable pleasure at some bottommost outpost of experience from where the human drama can be viewed in an array of its most criminal loveliness and most personal violence." - Lonely Christopher