Review of "Ten Things About Ryan" by Cara Zang

Score: 89+/100 (8.9+ out of 10)

Ten Things About Ryan is a short yet heartfelt and emotionally heart-wrenching memoir about childhood friendship, first love, devastating loss, and learning how to carry someone's memory forward after they are gone.

Author Cara Zang takes us back to when she was ten years old and first met Ryan through her school's "Big Buddy" program. At first, Ryan is simply the new kid she has been assigned to show around, a boy who talks incessantly about sports and quickly earns the private nickname "Mr. Mets and Cowboys." But after discovering that they are in the same fifth-grade class, sitting almost directly across from one another, that mildly annoying new kid gradually becomes one of the most important people in Cara's young life.

Their relationship is charming precisely because of how innocent it is. They joke around, spend time together at school, become boyfriend and girlfriend, share a first kiss, and eventually have their first couple's skate at a roller rink. These are not earth-shattering events by adult standards, but when you're ten years old, they might as well be. A seat assignment can determine whether the school year is ruined. Holding hands can feel like a major life event. A first kiss becomes something you remember decades later.

That ordinary childhood atmosphere is important because Ten Things About Ryan eventually becomes anything but ordinary.

While Cara is visiting her grandparents during spring break, her mother unexpectedly arrives to bring her home. She is crying, and Cara initially wonders whether something has happened to her father or even the family dog. Then her mother hands her a newspaper. Cara reads about a spring-break car crash and eventually sees Ryan's name followed by the name of his younger sister.

This is probably the most emotionally riveting sequence in the book. What makes it effective is not elaborate prose or some grand meditation on mortality. It is Cara's inability, as a ten-year-old child, to understand what she is reading. She has just seen Ryan. She hugged him. Children are not supposed to die. She even wonders whether "dead" might somehow work the way it does in movies, where someone appears to be gone and then turns out not to be. That confusion feels painfully real.

The chapters that follow deal with Ryan's funeral and Cara's return to school, where perhaps the most effective image in the entire book is waiting for her: Ryan's empty desk.

His seat remains diagonally across from Cara's, exactly where it had been before spring break. This resonated with us because we just read Dr. Kimberly Harms's Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss, which devotes an entire chapter to what Harms calls “The Loneliness of an Empty Chair.” Harms writes about a phenomenon many grieving people experience: how someone's absence seems to become concentrated in the ordinary physical spaces they once occupied. The breakfast table. The passenger seat. Their favorite spot on the couch. An empty chair. Cara experiences essentially the same thing at ten years old. Ryan's empty desk becomes her empty chair. It is still sitting exactly where it always sat, diagonally across from her, but the person who is supposed to be there is gone.

Ryan's mother gives Cara a framed photograph of him, and Cara places it on her own desk so that the frame touches the corner of Ryan's empty one. It is such a small gesture, yet it communicates something the book's more direct explanations of grief sometimes cannot. Ryan is gone, but Cara is desperately trying to keep some physical part of him beside her.

Eventually, a school counselor gives Cara an exercise: write down ten things about Ryan that made him special.

And that explains the title. Cara realizes that she could easily think of more than ten, but she settles on memories such as his laugh, jokes, love of sports, loyalty to his friends, voice, smile, love for his family and dog, their first kiss, and the way he hugged. More importantly, talking about those memories eventually makes Cara laugh, which initially fills her with guilt. The counselor helps her understand that laughing about Ryan does not mean she has stopped missing him, and continuing to live does not mean forgetting him.

There is a genuinely worthwhile message here. Ten Things About Ryan gradually shifts the focus away from the way Ryan died and back toward the way Ryan lived.

The book also incorporates a journal or workbook element. Chapters conclude with "Things to Write About" prompts encouraging readers to reflect on their own friendships, memories, grief, and significant moments. That makes this something slightly different from a conventional memoir. It could potentially serve as a conversation starter for parents, teachers, counselors, or children who are themselves dealing with loss.

However, this is also where we arrive at our biggest criticism: There simply isn't enough here to score it above other memoirs in the contest.

Ten Things About Ryan is sparse. Very sparse.

It felt like it ended as soon as it got going.

Maybe that's a bit of a compliment, in a sense, because we really wanted more. Authors work for decades to get their readers to want more.

There's something that feels really unfinished and rushed about this book. It feels like the author was on some kind of strict word count or deadline. For a book centered entirely around remembering Ryan, we wanted considerably more memories of Ryan. The early chapters establish him efficiently, but they move through the relationship rather quickly. Ryan likes sports. Ryan jokes around. Cara and Ryan become friends. They date. They kiss. They skate together. Then spring break arrives, and suddenly Ryan is gone. Because the real circumstances are so heartbreaking, the loss naturally carries tremendous emotional weight, but the narrative itself does not spend enough time allowing Ryan to become equally vivid to the reader before that loss occurs.

We would have loved another ten stories about him, never mind ten things. What did he joke about? What did he and Cara actually talk about during all those school days? What made her laugh? What made him angry? What did he do that drove her crazy besides talking about sports? What specific moments made her realize that this irritating "Mr. Mets and Cowboys" kid had become her best friend and boyfriend?

Those details are exactly what could have transformed a touching remembrance into something much deeper and richer. Ironically, the book itself proves this point whenever it slows down enough to give us one of those specific memories. The roller-skating scene works because it is concrete. The empty desk works because we can picture it. The photograph touching the corner of Ryan's desk works because Cara gives us something tangible. These are the moments when Ryan stops being an idea and becomes a boy who once occupied a particular chair, wore particular clothes, liked particular teams, kissed a particular girl, and existed in a very particular time and place. We simply wanted more of them.

This book reads like it was written when the author was still very young (in grade school) in a day or two. If the author had gone back as an adult and rewritten it--fleshed things out and improved the overall literary quality of it--this would be a far superior memoir. They might talk about the decades since that tragedy, catching up with the family of Ryan & his sister (maybe an interview), independent research (via newspaper article archives, perhaps) into how the tragedy impacted the community and others involved... things like that. There's a lot of potential content there. A lot of stones left unturned.

The writing can also be extremely direct. Cara frequently tells us exactly what she felt rather than allowing a longer scene to reveal it. In fairness, some of that simplicity seems somewhat appropriate for the book's intended accessibility and childhood perspective. A book discussing death with younger readers probably does not need to wrap every emotion inside six layers of symbolism. Still, greater scene development would have strengthened the narrative without making it inaccessible.

And because so many pages are devoted to prompts, writing space, chapter breaks, and reflective material, the physical length of the book somewhat disguises how little narrative prose is actually here. The interactive approach has value, but readers looking primarily for a memoir may finish feeling as though the story has ended shortly after it truly gets started.

With that said, it occurred to us that this may be a memoir intended for children--perhaps middle-grade. The simplicity, directness, and straightforward nature of this book may be intended to cater to them. Perhaps it's meant to give children who are suffering loss, tragedy, or trauma a super simple & easy read to help get them through it. That's understandable.

From a literary perspective...

Consuming this book for the first time was a little like being very hungry and being given a small plate of food. At first, you wish there were more. But because there is only so much in front of you, you slow down. You take your time. You chew. You savor each bite a little more carefully than you otherwise might. That is somewhat how Ten Things About Ryan worked on us. We read it again, and then again, and each time we noticed something else: a small memory, a detail about Ryan, a moment between him and Cara, or an image that lingered longer than it had the first time.

We actually read Ten Things About Ryan several more times, and each reading revealed a little more to us. On our first pass, we admittedly felt somewhat cheated. That's it? It's over already? The book is so brief, and Ryan disappears from the story almost as soon as we have started getting to know him. But the more we thought about it, the more strangely fitting that began to feel.

Ryan and his younger sister did not receive a long buildup to what happened to them. They were not given a dramatic final chapter or some grand farewell. Their lives were simply cut short. Abruptly. Without warning. One moment Ryan was a ten-year-old boy going to school, joking with his friends, skating with his girlfriend, and looking forward to everything that came next. Then, suddenly, he wasn't.

We think we know what the author was going for: presenting the innocence and naivety of being a young person experiencing a profound loss for the first time.

And can we just say this--because it has been bothering us: this is such a beautiful, touching, impactful, and emotionally charged tribute. We can just imagine how extraordinary this book could've been if it were more patiently developed and fleshed out, that's all. It still takes a ton of courage to create and put out such an emotionally heavy work.

We still believe the book would have been stronger with more detailed stories/memories, more conversations, and more of Ryan himself. Or maybe a bit about his family, especially his younger sister, who should be honored and remembered too. We'll take some time to do that.

​We would've loved for the writing to be more elaborate and sophisticated. Those criticisms did not disappear after rereading it. If anything, our repeated readings made us want those missing memories even more. And it makes us appreciate the innocence and naivite behind the writing as well. Perhaps there is something painfully appropriate about finishing Ten Things About Ryan and wishing you had been given more time with Ryan. Cara undoubtedly wished for exactly the same thing.

And that is ultimately where this little book stayed with us. Its greatest strength is not its length, its complexity, or even its prose. It is the way something so modest gradually accumulates emotional weight. The things Cara remembers are not monumental events. They are a laugh, a joke, a favorite team, a smile, a hug, a song, a kiss, and an empty chair. Yet that is precisely how people survive in our memories: not necessarily through grand moments, but through dozens of tiny ones that become priceless only after we realize there will never be any new ones. Some stories feel unfinished because the lives behind them were unfinished too.

Fortunately, the book saves one of its most powerful decisions for last. After spending the entire story hearing about Ryan through Cara's memories, the reader eventually reaches a memorial page containing a real photograph of Ryan Gregory Black, May 11, 1978 to March 30, 1989.
Suddenly, there he is.
Not a character.
Not simply "Ryan."
A real ten-year-old boy smiling at the camera.

That final photograph gives the entire book an additional emotional dimension and reinforces what Ten Things About Ryan does best. This is not really a book about death. It is a book about refusing to allow death to become the only thing remembered about someone.

Check it out on Amazon!