Two Families. Lots of Secrets.
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This book is about two families whose lives overlap. There are Margaret and Felix Salt and Cal and Becky Jenkins. They all live in a fictional town in Ohio called Bonhomie.
The book opens on V-E Day in 1945 with Margaret noticing commotion in the street and wondering what it is about. She enters a hardware store and asks the person working there – Cal – if he has a radio and why it is not on. Once it is, they hear Truman informing the country that Germany has surrendered to the Allied forces. In response to the news, Margaret takes Cal by the shoulders, pulls him toward her, and kisses him.
After the kiss, the book takes us back in time to show us how Margaret and Cal – and Becky and Felix – got to the point in life where such a thing could happen.
Each of these four adults have an element in their past that defines them. Margaret is an orphan, but this is a closely held secret. Cal was born with one leg two inches shorter than the other. Becky has powers that allow her to commune with the deceased. And I will let Felix’s issues unfold for you when they do. Suffice it to say they are all complex characters doing the best with what life has handed them.
While Cal’s legs make him ineligible for military service, Felix does go off to war. His experiences aboard a Navy cargo ship are harrowing. He survives physically but is very damaged emotionally.
Upon Felix’s return from the war, Margaret and Cal cut off the affair that resulted from the V-E Day kiss. But when Margaret becomes pregnant soon after her husband’s return, paternity is an issue she thinks about and Cal tries not to think about.
Years pass and through a series of coincidences, Cal and Becky’s son (Skip) meets Margaret and Felix’s son (Tom) when they are 9 and 7 respectively. And they become friends. It is Skip who gives Tom the nickname, Buckeye.
That’s all I will say about the plot, but I would like to mention the wonderful response the book has had.
- It was chosen as a Read with Jenna Book Club for September, 2025
- Maureen Corrigan reviewed it on NPR’s Fresh Air on September 10, 2025
- Ann Patchett named it her favorite book of the year (2025) in a PBS News Hour interview.
- And it got a glowing review in the New York Times which summed it up this way: “Buckeye is a reminder of the deep pleasure of following a cast of characters over their entire lives, through births, deaths, marriages, tragedies and, in this case, hard-won reconciliations.”
So that’s the book and that’s its reception. I personally loved watching Margaret in action. She was my favorite of the adults. All of her actions were so hard to understand, but on the other hand, so very understandable. I guess that means she was a very well written character, which is my main praise for this book.
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Looking for your next book to read? Please consider my newest book, Chai on Life. It contains 36 slice-of-life stories ranging in topics from belly fat to Billy Joel. It is available wherever books are sold and on Amazon. There is even a companion journal for you to write the stories of your life.
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