All the Castles Burned

by Michael Nye

When Owen Webb, the son of working-class parents, receives a scholarship to the prestigious Rockcastle Preparatory Academy, the mysterious and enigmatic Carson Bly, an upperclassman from a wealthy and powerful family, befriends him. Their friendship, deepened through a love of basketball, becomes an obsession for Owen who is desperate to avoid the growing trouble at home between his parents. When Owen's father is arrested for a shocking and unexpected crime, his family is torn apart, and Owen's anger and fear are carefully manipulated by Carson’s mercurial and increasingly dangerous personality. Owen, who has fallen in love with Carson's beautiful but troubled sister, quickly finds himself caught up in a complex web of lies that threatens his once promising future.

Genres: Book Club, Fiction, Adult Fiction, Coming Of Age

384 pages, Paperback

First published February 13, 2018

About the author

Michael Nye is the author of three books: the short-story collection STRATEGIES AGAINST EXTINCTION, the novel ALL THE CASTLES BURNED, and his forthcoming collection UNTIL WE HAVE FACES (Turner Publishing, 2020).

He attended the Ohio State University, where he graduated with a B.A. in English, and the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he earned his M.F.A. in creative writing.

His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Literary Review, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Crab Orchard Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review, New South, Sou’wester, and South Dakota Review, among many others. His work has been a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in fiction and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

He lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio, and is the editor-in-chief of Story.

Reviews

[Sarah at Sarah's Bookshelves · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Turner Publishing and Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book.

All the Castles Burned was such a pleasant surprise for me (because it had not come recommended by someone who had already read the book…i.e. it was a risk that paid off!). It’s a classic coming of age story with some dysfunctional family drama, some “outsider enters the realm of the wealthy” dynamics, a foreboding friendship, a father/son angle, a touch of romance, and basketball. You can feel the tension simmering and you know things will explode at some point. It’s just a matter of when and how. The writing is stellar, especially for a debut, and I highlighted often. While basketball does play a significant role in the story and there is occasional overkill on the details of the game, basketball’s role in the story is similar to baseball’s in The Art of Fielding. I’d recommend this one for fans of Shadow of the Lions (my review) and Unraveling Oliver.

Visit https://www.sarahsbookshelves.com for more reviews.

[Ted Masthay · Rating 5 out of 5]

A coming of age novel set in mid 90s Cincinnati that forces the reader to reminisce about their high school friendships no matter how good or bad they were.

At only ~330 pages, Nye expertly navigates the issues of class resentment, male friendship, parental abandonment, the centrality of sports to the lives of young men, and how solitary acts of rashness can affect so many lives without falling victim to the tropes that can befall the genre.

Additionally, as a basketball fan myself, it was refreshing to see the sport get a proper literary treatment, too. An absolutely wonderful debut novel that has me eagerly awaiting the next entry to Nye’s soon to be classic catalogue.

[Elaine - Small Farm Big Life · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't really expect to like this book was much as I did. Honestly, once I started reading I wondered what had caused me to put the book on my to be read list at all. I am not a sports person so when All the Castles Burned started talking a lot about basketball I was worried I would quickly lose interest, but I didn't.

All the Castle Burned is based in the 1990's. There are a lot of references that brought me back to my high school experience. Owen is a regular kid who's getting himself into a lot of trouble in public school. His mom convinces him to test for the elite private school and to his surprise he gets in.

Right away Owen recognizes that he's different. With his school insignia blazer rather than a brand name. His mom drops him off and picks him up rather than him having an expensive car to drive home in or friends he grew up with to ride home with. It is a different world and Owen really doesn't fit in.

"Even in the nineties, when pleats were acceptable, the drape of my pants was wrong, the fabric too heavy. And my mouth revealed all: I had brilliantly white teeth from brushing, but the lack of braces meant my teeth were gapped and uneven. I only spoke in class when called on, keeping both my uncertain answers and less than perfect teeth hidden."

Owen finds himself shooting hoops on his free period and befriends an older boy who is popular named Carson Bly. From the outside Carson has it all. He's given everything he could ever want, but underneath all of that Carson is a boy raising himself and his sister. His father works constantly and his mother passed away. For Owen it's a ticket to freedom, but for Carson it's just enough rope to get himself into trouble. 

There was enough description that I understood what was going on in the basketball games and why that was so important. There were also a couple of twists that I hadn't seen coming in the book. Owen's father isn't who he seems to be and Carson may be more trouble than his friendship is worth.

Overall this is good fiction that is worth reading. Michael Nye does a fantastic job of transporting the reader to a prep school in the nineties. His characters are raw and he slowly defines each of them as the book moves forward.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

What’s in the head of young, taciturn Owen Web? Even Web, All the Castles Burned’s narrator, doesn’t know. I was most interested in the character’s underlying and prevalent anger, which is both intrinsic to his personality and reactive to his increasingly stressful circumstances: an obsession with a older classmate/friend, his parent’s crumbling marriage, a shocking truth unearthed about his father, and...no spoilers. We start the book knowing that Owen has been moved to a fancy private school in order to separate him from a probable-ruffian future. In the elite setting, he does “blossom,” achieving discipline, academic and sports excellence, and what turns out to be a watertight set of principles.

Wolff’s Old School and Sittenfeld’s Prep are decent comparative starting points, but Castles is darker, angrier, funnier, and more overtly masculine. It’s also structurally more complex with multiple plot apex points. Basically, the book has it all: the have and have nots, gritty basketball throw down, fight scenes with free flowing blood, virgin sex, too much Mountain Dew, and compelling and deeply empathetic characters. I was rooting for Owen the whole time. Best of all, Castles kept me turning pages and wishing for more.

[Mary Jacqueline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book ever! Read it friends!!

[Erin O'Riordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suppose this is meant to be Literary and Serious, but in all honesty, it doesn't have much of a plot. It's more of a character study of Owen Webb, and he's essentially the same person at 28 that he is at 16. Granted, he's a likable person, and as someone who was also 16 in the 1990s, I can relate to many of his thoughts and actions. But he has very little agency in his own life. Things happen to him and happen around him, but seldom happen because of him.

Perhaps because of this, we read the Climactic Scene secondhand through Owen's mother, and that makes it less than climactic. The ending feels very tacked-on.

The explicitly-stated moral of this character study is that one should always have a mother, because it's the motherless boy who turns out Bad. Even a half-assed mother is better than none, according to Nye's narration. Owen, of course, has no control over the fact that his mother is present and largely functional, despite dabbling in alcoholism. But we're told that this is what allows him to grow up to be, presumably, a pretty decent person.

I like Owen, but I'd rather read about what happens to him in the boxing ring as a grown-up man with grown-up thoughts than secondhand witness what he passively witnesses as a fairly typical adolescent. Owen's teenage problems are very much First World Problems. At no time in the novel is he in any immediate danger, which makes the stakes of his entire story feel quite low.

Michael Nye, please raise the stakes next time.

I won an uncorrected proof of this book from the publisher in a random drawing and was not obligated in any way to review it.

[Lee Levin · Rating 5 out of 5]

All The Castles Burned is, when all is said and done, a book about the impact of absent and unengaged parenting. And somehow Nye manages to get this concept across without overwrought "life lessons," making the story a wonderfully prescient and captivating coming-of-age tale. I read this during every free moment I had and became completely immersed in Owen's precocious telling. Highly recommended.

[Gina McDonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

So...not sure what to say except it was the strangest reading experience of my life. This was literally based on my old “brother” high school and eve ya from 1995/9) while I was there, although it’s considered “fiction”

Just read it Moeller/Mt Notre Dame grads

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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.

[Alexis Leon · Rating 3 out of 5]

NOTE: This review refers to an uncorrected proof received from Turner Publishing

This is the first book I have read from Michael Nye. I enjoy his writing style, and the characterization which his detailed language so easily affords. The story focuses on Owen Webb, a 14-year-old boy living in Ohio, who finds himself at the start of not just a new school year, but a year of total reinvention in his new prep school. Despite my never having been a teenage boy, the inner monologues and description of feelings felt very authentic. I did tend to become lost in the lengthier descriptions of basketball, even as Nye attempts to be inclusive in his attention to detail. I suppose they would be more exciting to watch, but his is a decent attempt to capture the fire and fury of live sporting events.

What does shine, though, is Owen's sense of import, his growing sense of self, as he rises in the ranks of first junior varsity and then varsity basketball. His burgeoning friendship with teammate Carson Bly, an upperclassman two years ahead of Owen, highlights the emotionally elusive Carson as well as Owen's heightened self-awareness in comparison to Carson. I'm not giving too much away when I say that over the course of the book, Owen essentially comes to recognize the hallmarks of an abusive and toxic relationship, and this knowledge becomes pivotal in the book's final 50 pages, as Owen faces a catalytic road trip with Carson literally at the wheel.

Overall, I like Nye's style, but the too-tidy summation in the final 20 pages left me a little meh. That said, I will certainly pick up something else by him should the opportunity arise.

[Joe Bruno · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hesitated before I went with four stars. If you have read my reviews you know the stars are given not for how good I think a book is, but rather for how much it meant to me. I think my opinion of this book may change with time to reflect. I can be a bit slow on the uptake and the full meaning of a story can elude me. I may end up liking it less than I do at this moment, just having finished reading.

What I can say with certainty my appreciation of the writing will not change. This is a very well written book, professional, clear (hard to do with the action in sports), and quite descriptive without that creative writing feel to it. Nye is not pretentious or overly flowery in his writing, he also does not seem to affecting a voice, he has a measured descriptive level that is rich and satisfying.

I would recommend this to a reader of literature, not a thriller or horror or romance reader. I was recommended this book by Anne Earney. (Thank you Anne.) I made a Goodreads connection with her for some reason or another and she mentioned this book and that she had been at UMSL with Nye in the Writing MFA program there. I graduated from UMSL with a BA in English last year and bought the book new on Amazon to support Nye as a writer. I am glad I did. I might have been able to get it at the library, I don't know, I didn't try.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an uncorrected proof of this book through a contest. Glad to say I didn't see many mistakes; I think there was one misuse of a word but I really can't recall what it was. Certainly made no difference in the enjoyment of the book. While this book wasn't bad, it's not one I really loved. I could not relate to any of the characters or feel anything for them. That's not a requirement for loving a book, though it helps. The writing itself was quite good. I just didn't care about the story itself - too much basketball for my taste. The characters were depressing and I felt a bit low reading this. I felt a little better by the end but it was still a tad depressing. Sometimes life is that way - not all endings are rosy. Reading something like this makes one appreciate their own life more.

[Anne Earney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Nye and I were working on our MFAs at the same time, which is the reason I read his novel. Otherwise I would have been put off by the heavy sports influence, and, as expected, I didn't get much from the descriptions of basketball games, practice, etc. What I did like was the creepy pseudo friendship between the main character, Owen Webb, and his wealthy prep school buddy, Carson. Although it's not explored or explained, it felt complicated in way that fascinated me, and that felt familiar. Maybe we've all had a friend like that, someone we were drawn to despite their negative qualities. The author does a good job of illustrating that friendship, both the high points and the low, which are often disturbingly similar. There's a fine line between taking chances and having fun, and risking too much, going too far, and Carson shows Owen just how easy it is to cross that line.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a free advanced copy of this book and started reading it and thought "Oh, no a book about sports!" With two athletic children and years of sitting on the sidelines, I prefer my reading to be sports free, but I did not mind the basketball in this book which became less prominent as the book progressed. It has been a while since I have read a coming of age novel and it brought me right back to the complexity of high school friendships. The relationships in this book are interesting, and as a parent I related to the mother and the dilemma of how to handle a friendship of her child which she felt was unhealthy. It shows how the choices we make as teens affect the rest of our lives and how people's outward image is often conflicting with their true selves.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second book about sports that I have recently read, the other being "The Art of Fielding." Owen Webb is new at a boys' prep school and he is quickly befriend by Carson. Carson is older and gives Owen advice on improving his basketball game, how to dress, and how to be more socially cool. Carson comes from a wealthy family while Owen is lower middle-class. The prose is well done here, the descriptions of the basketball games are exciting and tension-filled. And the insecurities and bad choices that Owen makes are heartfelt. My biggest problem with the book are the sex scenes which I thought were over the top with detail.

[J.E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found Michael Nye's novel strangely empty of resolution. Basically a coming-of-age in Cincinnati book, the writing is strong and the premise initially engaging. Main character Owen narrates his life from the age of fourteen until his late twenties as it revolves around his attendance at prestigious Rockcastle. When he meets rich-boy Carson, they bond over basketball, but there is something not quite right about his friend. The novel promises more than, ultimately, it delivers. I felt let down, which is exactly how Owen feels, I believe, so perhaps Nye achieved precisely what he wanted to do. I would recommend it, if only so I could discuss the plot with someone else!

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was an odd story about a boy from the wrong side of the tracks on scholarship at a prep school. He makes friends with a wealthy but troubled boy and spends an exorbitant time playing basketball and dealing with a crappy home life. It was interesting to read from a male point of view since so few male authors are published these days, but there was too much basketball for my taste and I didn't find the plotline very believable.

[Todd Ewing · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was slow burn. This book ended up on my TRB list a few years ago and I finally got to it. As I read about the characters (basketball playing High School boys), I could not figure out why I wanted to read this, thinking it might have been a coming of age novel recommended by someone. I the end, the writing and the development and the angst began to win me over. In the end, this turned into a bitter-sweet struggle with nostalgia and loss of our youth. I highly recommend this book.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just not my thing at all. Some well-written moments sprinkled in throughout, but overwhemingly, characters felt only half real, and although the writing is clear, the minutia of every single scene was boring and didn't drive the plot forward. Don't even get me started on the sex scenes that spanned 5 pages and were so clearly written by a man; I'm embarrassed for him for that.

[Esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a genre I usually read but I had an opportunity to receive a free proof. It is well written with a well developed plot and a great cast of characters. Once I started reading, I was obsessed. Intriguing story about a young man trying to fit in where he is nothing like those around him. I will definitely read other books by this author.

[Sylvia · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5. I almost loved this book. It had elements of greatness. Characters that you can identify with, characters who are pretty messed up and a setting in a privileged school for boys. Ultimately, I felt the potential somehow drifted away and it turned out to be slightly disappointing because it petered out.

[Alison]

I read about 100 pages of this, then skimmed the rest after realizing that while I was curious about what would ultimately come of Owen & Carson’s relationship, I didn’t care enough about the characters to fully invest in the rest of the story. There’s no real driving plot and I didn’t find the characters that compelling.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This heartbreaking, coming of age story about a young man from a troubled family has me empathetic while reminiscing about high school. Even after the last page, it still has me thinking about what I've just finished reading. I think this book will bring great discussions among readers.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best way I can describe this book is eerie. it's not a scary or suspenseful book but the way this story unravels keeps you coming back for more. and I loved the Cincinnati setting. That definitely fostered my connection with the story.

[Brett · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5.
I wanted to like this book. It had promise, but we went from basketball to baseball to fighting.....but the situations I wanted to know more about were not "fleshed out" as they say. The author gets an B but his editor sucks. Could have been an excellent book with good editing.

[Pam Walrath · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intriguing characters and very well written; however, it somehow lacked an emotional pull for me. I definitely recommend reading it and look forward to other opinions.

[Rachel Harlow · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked how this book was written! I would read a book from him again!

[John Vanderslice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will be writing a review of this title for Pleiades Book Review. The review should appear in late 2018 or early 2019.

[Susan Reeves deMasi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I kept waiting for this to get interesting... But it kind of just didn't.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good coming of age story. Written from the point of view of juveniles but not a YA book. One of those tales with a continuous sense of impending doom. Well written and hard to put down.