Ransom Seaborn: Book Review

Singer/songwriter Bill Deasy http://www.billdeasy.com/, captures the essence of the freshman year in his award-winning first novel, Ransom Seaborn. Deasy recounts a college coming-of-age story with a troubadour’s love for the music of language.

Dan Finbar, aka Fin, struggles to find his place as a big-city Catholic freshman attending a rural, small-town, conservative Protestant college. From “meet the roommate” and parting with his parents to the stunning ending, this slim book recalls the new freedoms, turmoil, and longing to fit in common to the first-year college experience. Humor, poignancy, and mature themes abound as the author stirs memories of each readers’ college experience.

All references to persons living or dead are purely intentional. Deasy’s fictional Harrison College is Grove City College, in western Pennsylvania, where he graduated in ‘88. He dubs The Gedunk, Grove City’s popular student hangout and snack bar, the Podunk. Despite the name changes and decades since I graduated (‘75), his descriptions of the locale and Dr. Exley’s provocative classroom challenge ring true (flashback to the lone C in my major; Dr. Donnelly’s not-so-Romantic Lit at 8:00 A.M). For the source of the title character’s name plus campus references, read an article profiling Bill Deasy in The GēDUNK: Grove City College Alumni Magazine .(p.16, Fall 2007)

Ransom Seaborn won the former literary blog POD-dy Mouth’s 2006 Needle Award for Print-On-Demand books (out of a field of over 1,600 entrants).

At last count, 21 out of 23 customer reviews at amazon.com gave this book five stars with two four-star reviews.

Attention: once and future college English professors, if you teach a course on The Campus Novel, Creative Writing, or American Literature, this is one for the syllabus. To mashup lit crit speak, Ransom Seaborn is a timeless Bildungsroman á clef in the academic novel genre complete with road trip quest (via Greyhound), intertextuality, and a powerful denouement.

Warning—it will take willpower not to devour this book in one sitting.With its echoes of and critical comparisons to The Catcher in the Rye, Deasy’s work will whet your appetite to re-read J. D. Salinger’s novel and have a second helping of Ransom Seaborn.

Carol Scamman cscamman@sfasu.edu rm. 202e 936.468.1710 Subjects - Art, English, Modern Languages, Social Work, Sociology, Theatre