Ryder Stephens
A 13-year-old runaway finds a new home and faces her traumatic past in Ryder Stephens (SBC Publishing House) by Veronica Ventura, a moving story of loss, love and healing. It’s the day after Christmas, and Ryder has lost everything — her mother is dead, her father has chosen a Vegas blackjack table over being with his own family, and she wakes in an unfamiliar home assigned to her by social services. New to the city of San Francisco, she barely knows anyone. Her friends are back in Seattle, living another life she can no longer go back to. All she knows is that there must be some mistake; why didn’t her father come for her?
Determined to find him, she steals some cash, throws a few essentials into a backpack, grabs her beloved violin, and hops a bus to Las Vegas. But her hopes come crashing down when she finds him — drunk and angry and demanding to know why she isn’t with her foster family. There was no mistake; he didn’t ever intend to come get her. He was done being a dad.
A CROSS-COUNTRY JOURNEY TO A NEW BUT CONFLICTED LIFE
Blindsided and devastated by his rejection, she runs as far as she can get away by bus — all the way to New York City. Ill-prepared for life on the streets, she manages to find a place to stay that’s only marginally safer: a Harlem drug-dealer’s apartment. It’s here that she learns the ropes of life on the skids. A stolen ID later, she has a job bussing tables at a restaurant. She steals some mail addressed to a man with the same name as her father and uses it as proof of residency to sign up for school.
Her resourcefulness and will to survive are now her two most important possessions. But all of her hopes and dreams lie in another one — her violin, the one friend and escape she has in a confusing and frightening world. Carnegie Hall calls to her, and she will find some way, somehow, to get there.
A chance encounter on the steps of the New York Public Library with a man on his lunch hour becomes the catalyst for a new life in a new home. But it is far from the end of Ryder’s troubles and heartbreak. She is haunted by having found her mother dead, plagued by guilt over not having been home. What’s worse, her impossibly ideal new family is showing signs of deterioration that she can only guess at understanding. Adults have had a way of failing her, one by one, again and again, and she waits for the other shoe to drop.
A COMPLEX AND NUANCED POINT-OF-VIEW STORY
As seen through the eyes of Ryder, there is a constant sense of foreboding and fear. Highly attuned to body language and tone of voice, every interaction she has is fraught with subtext that walks the line between the perceived and the imagined, and the reader is continuously suspended in the subjectivity of her experiences.
Ryder isn’t just running away from foster care and a father who doesn’t care. She is running away from herself. She escapes into fantasy, bending the truth in ways that are easier for her to handle. But truth has ways of making itself heard, and as the novel progresses, we learn more and more about the trauma Ryder is suppressing. The clues accumulate, and we are anxious to follow them where they lead.
All of this creates a kind of suspense that drives the story forward. The reader becomes not only emotionally invested in the characters, but in the story itself. It is clear that Ryder has a deep secret that she is trying to keep even from herself. And there will be more loss and heartache before she can finally bring it to the surface and give it a voice.
Ryder Stephens is coming-of-age fiction about the transformation of a privileged, self-centered child to one who finds compassion and understanding for the flawed adults in her life. It is also the story of the stages of grief, both experienced and observed. But in the end, it is about hope — how, as Kahlil Gibran once wrote, “The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
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About Veronica Ventura:
Veronica Ventura is an American Gynecologist and a global public health practitioner. Over the course of her career, she has worked in Somali refugee camps, Ebola Treatment Centers, and villages in Timor Leste, Ladakh, India and Cambodia. She uses her diverse experiences in the medical field to help create strong, dynamic characters in her writing. She holds degress from the University of California at Davis, Tulane University School of Medicine, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Ventura currently resides Singapore with her husband, four cats, and two dogs: Ryder and Samantha.
