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Ryan's expansive work of fiction tackles the story of one peculiarly dysfunctional family. Smart, touching, and funny, Ryan's outlandish characters soon become as familiar and dear to readers as their own family members. Such is Ryan's gift: a hugely compassionate eye, which he uses judiciously.

In most families, a certain patriarch or matriarch holds sway, exerting a kind of gravitational force that holds everyone together. Not so with the Ragazzino/Kerrigan clan. While it's doubtful that Teresa, mother of four and Ryan's central character, ever possessed such power over her brood, what little she might have wielded is long gone by the time her second husband exits the scene. Her children spin out of control, orbiting further and further away from her, until it appears they're a family devoid of a center. Her eldest son, Matt, leaves to care for the father who abandoned him. Karen, a formerly sassy teenager, enters a strange marriage with a born-again salesman. Joe, one of two gay sons, is undone by the fact that his younger brother, Frankie, staked claim to the single homosexual slot allotted to any one family. And Frankie, a sci-fi geek who believes in alien life forms, is the only one to return home.

With this beautifully written and haunting story of family love and loss, Ryan stakes his claim in the world of American letters. (Spring 2006 Selection)

Publishers Weekly

Ryan's debut novel, suffused with an earnestness that might seem cloying were it not for his ease and control, follows Teresa Kerrigan as she struggles to raise four children, two from each of her two failed marriages. The novel covers 30 years from the mid-1960s. By the '70s, the family is in northeast Florida, with NASA launches nearby, and youngest son Frankie can't shake his boyhood obsession with spaceships and science fiction. As an adolescent Frankie happily embraces his belief that he is gay, dreaming wistfully of Luke Skywalker. Next oldest Joe, who narrates some chapters, has a more painful time sorting through his own messy sexuality, while the eldest, Matt, leaves the household at 18 to care for his sick father, and Karen, a high school dropout, marries at 21 and withdraws emotionally from her mother-as each child does in his or her own way. Ryan gets the dreariness and tumult of the Kerrigan lives right, presenting Teresa as flawed but sympathetic, and her brood as reactive in familiar but nicely specified ways. All are compassionately drawn through Joe's articulate bewilderment, particularly the sensitive and surprising Frankie, who comes to dominate Joe's own self-exploration. When AIDS eventually figures into the plot, Ryan maintains this impressive debut's nuance and sweetness to the end. (Feb. 7) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Teresa Kerrigan never envisioned herself as a twice-divorced mother of four. Somehow, life has conspired against all of her dreams and she is left trying to raise her children in 1970s Florida, surrounded by the Nixon scandals, Apollo launches, and streets of identical ranch houses. Ryan skillfully weaves Teresa's story with those of her children as they try to make it to adulthood intact. Matt, the eldest, barely remembers his father but impulsively goes to live with him at 18. Karen, the only daughter, uses rebellion as a buffer against the dysfunction that permeates the household and openly flouts parental authority. Joe struggles mightily to be the "normal" and good son, but cannot escape feelings of shame and inadequacy over his homosexuality. And Frankie, the youngest, cloaks himself with myriad eccentricities and uses them as a magnet to draw others into his circle. On the outer perimeter, readers glimpse two ex-husbands and the ways that they ebb and flow in their children's lives. In weaving together the strands that make up the stories of one family over four decades, Ryan does not attempt to tie up loose ends or heal all of the resentments that have built up. But he does paint a powerful picture of dysfunction intertwined with humor, love, and hope. Teens will find much to relate to and may even walk away with a deeper appreciation of the quirkiness of their own families.-Kim Dare, Fairfax County Public Library System, VA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Think you have trouble in your family? The mother of a party girl, a slacker boy, a closeted gay son and another gay son with AIDS is deserted by two husbands. Like mother Teresa's family, this first novel is fragmented: Chapters set between 1965 and 2006 are told achronologically through the siblings' and parents' viewpoints. Mysterious events (the first husband's disappearance) and wacky ideas (son Frankie's belief in alien abduction) make for some eccentric characters whom Ryan transforms into oddly reasonable and sympathetic people by story's end. The coming-of-age chapters-Karen's hot-rodding with hoodlum friends, Joe's struggle to come out at college-are predictable, but in their 30s and 40s, the abandoned kids, along with their aging parents, feel more individualized. Slacker Matt spends years taking care of the ill father who left him and then took him in. Karen occasionally steps out on, yet always returns to, her evangelical husband. Set largely on Florida's Merritt Island in the shadow of the space program, this book is about going far out from home. Ryan refers to the first Challenger tragedy and knows not everyone makes the return trip, so his novel eschews sentimentality. Several of the chapters, particularly one about all the kids in a single motel room, are even humorous. But covering 40 years and seven characters, the book needs to be twice as long to avoid "remember when?" anecdotalism. If Ryan's dysfunctional family has been invented, rather than reported on or confessed, he has promise.