Michael Nye’s novel All The Castles Burned hooks you from the first chapter and holds on. The reader becomes enmeshed in a world where classes clash aMichael Nye’s novel All The Castles Burned hooks you from the first chapter and holds on. The reader becomes enmeshed in a world where classes clash and the perfect castles on the hill are shown to contain the cracks that you can’t see from a distance. The novel works to show the divide between the lower and upper classes while suggesting that everything isn’t as perfect as it appears when you drive through the rich neighborhoods. Owen Webb lives in a world in between classes in which he doesn’t feel like he really belongs. The end of the first chapter paints a picture of a boy, an outcast, a person “wrapped in ribbons of loneliness, an angry solitude from which� there is no escape. When he meets Carson the first Rockcastle student to see him as a person and not just a scholarship recipient Owen becomes infatuated with everything that is Carson. Carson is a young man from the right background, but as the story progresses there is something not quite right with this golden boy. Carson is the star basketball player on the varsity team and with his coaching and guidance Owen joins Carson there where he is able to come closer to being a part of a world he thought would remain out of reach. The world of All The Castles Burned centers around two friends that become close through the game of basketball, and even if you aren’t interested in basketball Nye draws you in with his electric descriptions of the flow of the game. Despite its focus on these two young basketball players the real impetus for the novel lies in the “friendship� between Owen and Carson. It is all a façade which is meticulously dismantled for the reader. The reader’s realization of Carson and the Rockcastle world is disrupted alongside Owen’s understanding of the world around him. He knows and the reader knows that Owen doesn’t belong and maybe doesn’t want to belong to this world where “all Rockcastle scandals� was hushed rumor that [was] never spoke of in public.� The blue blood world was a place where the appearance was always more important than the reality. Carson serves to punctuate this point with the development of his face that he shows to the world one which Owen’s mother perceives the first time she meets him. Carson’s charisma doesn’t fool her as she comments that “there’s nothing behind his friendliness, is there?� In a world ruled by civility and façade Carson epitomizes this society. His friendliness is a sociopathic representation for the world which eventually mirrors another close relations Owen deals with in his life. Owen’s friendship with Carson begins to take a dark turn as the reader begins to understand Carson better than Owen. Owen becomes obsessed and his relationship with Caitlin, Carson’s sister, punctuates this point. Even in an intimate moment with Caitlin Owen can only think about how this will serve to keep him close to Carson. If there is one thing that could be said negatively about the book it is the development of Caitlin’s character. She becomes incredibly important to Owen as the story continues, and when tragedy strikes Owen’s life the first person he wants to get a hold of, after Carson, is Caitlin. Despite that the narrative does little to develop that relationship on anything then a merely superficial basis. Caitlin remains a character that exists in the background and only serves as a foil to the development of Carson’s character. At the climax of the novel the reader can only hope that Owen sees what his mother had known from the beginning as he spirals into a situation that has the potential to destroy his future. The reader grips the pages with intensity waiting to see whether Owen can rescue himself from what we all recognize. ...more
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