By now I’m sure y’all know that I’ve found a number of books that I loved via my boys’ required school reading. Most recently was Refugee, and now The Year We Disappeared by Cylin and John Busby.
When John chose this title for his Lit class book club, I was immediately intrigued. This extraordinary true crime story is a father/daughter memoir. I read the book in one weekend and it is a story that won’t leave me soon. Every other chapter is told by John, the victim of a brutal shooting, with nine year old Cylin telling the alternate chapters. Many books are told like this, but the contrast of hearing the recount in the voice of a child versus an adult, and along the same lines of the family versus the victim, is compelling and poignant.
When Cylin Busby was nine years old, she was obsessed with Izod clothing, the Muppets, and a box turtle she kept in a shoebox. Then everything changed overnight. Her police officer father, John, was driving to his shift when someone leveled a shotgun at his window. The blasts that followed left John’s jaw on the passenger seat of his car-literally. While clinging to life, he managed to write down the name of the only person he thought could have pulled the trigger. The suspect? A local ex-con with rumored mob connections. The motive? Officer Busby was scheduled to testify against the suspect’s family in an upcoming trial. Overnight, the Busbys went from being the “family next door” to one under 24-hour armed guard, with police escorts to school, and no contact with friends. Worse, the shooter was still on the loose, and it seemed only a matter of time before he’d come after John-or someone else in the family-again. With few choices left to them, the Busby family went into hiding, severing all ties to the only life they had known.
My John loved this book as much as I did and we had some great conversations afterwards. Kudos to his lit teacher for both hosting a book club AND for providing such interesting titles to choose from. If my required reading throughout middle and high school had been this interesting I might not have ended up at Georgia Tech. :-)
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