Ghost Medicine

Troy, Gabe, and Tom are three teenaged friends, living in ranch country, somewhere in California, probably.  Some place where open pastures have been carved out of redwood forests.

Tom, the joker, the trickster, the coyote.  Gabe, the shy, sensitive boy, the kind one, the saintly one.  And Troy, the silent narrator, the brooding philosopher.

Troy's dad and Gabe's dad had been best friends as kids.  As adults, they still called themselves close friends, but, as Troy tells us, they are polite with each other like "members of the same stamp club or something."

[B]oth of those men just seemed to me like they never wanted to show how things really affected them, and it always made me wonder about the cost of growing up.

Andrew Smith's earliest novel, Ghost Medicine, is about many things.  It's about the silence of the open spaces and of the people who live and ranch there.  It's about friendship.  It's about caring for the horse who is both friend and transportation, about protecting cattle and goats from predators, about the way the sun reflects from nearby granite peaks at a certain time of day.  It's about Troy's theory that what happens, happens; that you can look back and sometimes see how you caused events to happen, but can never know in advance how an act will "ripple like the surface of a pond once a rock has been skipped," disturbing everything it touches.

But it's also about the "cost of growing up."

Troy, Gabe, and Tom have very different personalities.  They aren't given to rambling conversations with each other.  They tease.  They speak by staying silent, by joking, by spitting tobacco, by changing the subject.  Several women or girls, commenting on the novel on Goodreads, denounce the story as just one more irritating example of guys who never even talk to each other, and just go through life oblivious.  But these three guys know each other, and each other's moods, and each other's feelings better than they'll ever know anyone again in their lives.  They don't need to speak in complete sentences to communicate their ideas or their emotions.

Troy falls in love with Luz, Gabe's older sister.  Their mutual love is another central theme of the book, but it never overwhelms the story as it might in too many young adult novels.  Luz, too, is from the ranch community, and they understand each other.

As the novel moves into its second half, its mood darkens.  Small incidents, especially conflicts with the thuggish son of the local sheriff, "ripple" outward, threatening the quiet lives of Troy and his friends.  The boys make decisions -- which, in retrospect, prove to be poor decisions.  They ride together up into the hills, chasing the sheriff's son and his equally thuggish friend. 

We had been warned of disaster from the very beginning, and disaster has been foreshadowed throughout the novel.  Not everyone comes back down alive.  And those who do return are no longer the same boys.

But all three boys had been changing throughout the novel, changing as they reacted to their experiences.  They had been losing their boyhoods, becoming -- for better or for worse -- men.  Much earlier, Troy had spun a theory that every animal had a form of "medicine," and that the blood from a cougar they had just killed provided them with "ghost medicine" -- medicine that made you invisible to the eyes of others.  Much later, he muses --

I told Gabriel that ghost medicine was everything we could ever want; that it was more powerful than we knew, more than we could reckon with.  And in the end, I guess, it did make us disappear.  But it wasn't like a cheap illusion in a magic show, because we didn't realize that it took us in pieces, not all at once, and others could see those bits vanish away and I, we, could only feel them in ourselves, thinking all the time This is what I want, this is what I want, until those lost pieces revisit us in dreams and make us thrash and grab for them only to swish our sweaty, empty hands in the air.

The fears, the guilt, and the desires of the surviving boys cost them the innocence of their childhood, leaving them as adults. Adults, kind of like their dads.

Troy, Gabe, and Tom are three kids with -- compared to suburban kids -- an enormous amount of independence, self-sufficiency, and competence.  They cuss, they drink, they chew tobacco.  They have easy access to guns -- an access that is necessary for people on a ranch, but an access that invites tragedy.  During summer, when the novel takes place, they are largely on their own -- they have no "helicopter parents."

And they happen to be three of the most decent, kind, and "good" kids that you're apt to read about in today's literature.  Which is why so much of what happens hurts so much.

Three boys rode up there.
Not one of them came back.
Maybe all boys die like that.

Many young readers found the pace of the novel too slow, the descriptions too detailed.  They are used to more "action."  For those with the ability to savor the slow, quiet pace of outdoors life, I highly recommend this book.