Buckeye: A Slice of Americana During WWII

Patrick Ryan's 2025 Novel

Small-town life in Ohio in the 1940s

Patrick Ryan's 2025 novel, Buckeye, takes place in the small town of Bonhomie, Ohio in the 1940s. Today, few people remain alive who were young adults during World War II. Now, most of us can't really know the pain, trauma, and strategies practiced to survive this war when 25%-30% of all American males actively served in our country's military efforts.

But after reading Buckeye, I felt like I'd gotten a glimpse of what real life was like for average Americans waiting at home. Yes, life went on, but it went on differently than before, with many women "holding the fort," entertaining themselves, keeping homes going, and waiting every day for the "shoe to drop" and learn that their husbands, boyfriends, sons, or brothers had been killed, injured, or declared "Missing in Action."

In the town of Bonhomie, Ohio, a name which means "friendly, cheerful, genial," people's emotions don't always match the town's title.

One young couple at the beginning of life together

Cal Jenkins is a good guy, upset, embarrassed, and feeling inferior because he could NOT enlist. He was born with one leg significantly shorter than the other. Socially awkward, Cal was devastated by the loss of his mother when he was a young man. His father is a veteran of World War I, a drunken hoarder and mentally unstable man who pays no attention to his kind and devoted son.

But in small towns, young people dream, fall in love, get married, go to work, create homes, have kids, and raise families. Cal Jenkins was no different than anyone else. He meets Becky, a precocious young girl with loving, financially stable parents. Becky's dad hires Cal as an employee at his hardware store, and Cal and Becky marry, settling down in Bonhomie.

Like marriages everywhere, Cal and Becky hit "bumps in the road. " Becky spends her time helping people try to communicate with dead relatives or lovers. Cal doesn't truly accept that Becky's gift for "second sight" is real, and a big, giant emotional wrench is thrown into their marriage.

Enter Margaret and Felix

Margaret is a beautiful young woman, always stylishly and impeccably dressed. She grew up in an orphanage, a fact she hides from everyone, including her husband, the big, extremely handsome and athletic Felix Salt.

Felix is serving overseas, and Margaret is lonely and sexually deprived, and both have deep, destructive secrets.

Remember this picture?

Legendary Kiss: Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1945.

This photo has been viewed millions and millions of times since 1945. One sailor, ecstatic over the news that WWII had ended, grabbed a nurse and kissed her.

But get this:

That kind of passion existed in Bonhomie, Ohio, too. In the darkened basement of a small-town business, one rash action initiated a chain of events that rippled through a community for decades, searing souls and bringing out the best - and the worst - in those involved.

Not a fast read, but a satisfying one!

I wouldn't call this a fast read, but I found it a satisfying one filled with lots of interesting characters and details of a bygone era. We glimpse the inner lives and backstories of many of the townspeople, not just the four main characters. The plot intertwines stories and people over years and the course of the War.

Wartime trauma is explored, as are the different reactions to grief, stress, and loneliness. When a ship is torpedoed and goes down, lives are shattered. Loves are lost. Those who remain are irreversibly wounded, both physically and emotionally.

Wartime or not, women are expected to marry and have children, and both Becky and Margaret are pushed into that mold. Cal and Felix are expected to provide a "good living" for their families in Bonhomie, allowing the women to be full-time mothers and "homemakers."

But what if motherhood is not the epitome of life? What if small-town living is not comforting or enjoyable, but cloying and constraining?

Buckeye as the title....

A buckeye is a nut from a tree. The nut is big - (and toxic.) Brown and round, there is a light-colored patch in the center resembling the iris of a male deer's eye. Hence, the native American Indians named them "Buckeyes." Because these trees are prominent in Ohio, Ohio is known as the Buckeye State.

Not only does the title cement the geography of the story, but it also gives one of the important characters a meaningful nickname.

Reminiscent of....

Over my lifetime, I've read several "classic" books published 80-100 years ago that focus on quirky characters in small-town life, all with dreams, desires, and deeply hidden secrets. As I was reading Buckeye, I heard echoes of Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, Our Town by Thorton Wilder, and the 1915 Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters whispering in my mind.

All of these books focus on people living as best they could in small Midwestern towns with their individual oddities and eccentricities, moving through childhood, adulthood, and on to death.

People never change, and the things that happened in small-town life in the novel Buckeye in Bonhomie, Ohio in the 1940s were no different than they were in 1915 or they are now in 2025!

The moral of the story

Is the moral of the story that when we stray from what is right, bad things happen? There is so much more to this story than a simplistic "moral of the story." One of the beauties of Patrick Ryan's novel, Buckeye, is that we understand WHY these characters act the way they do, and our knowledge of why they behaved that way generates empathy - along with hope.

In the end, can people's goodness overcome their past mistakes?

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