We all make mistakes when we are young. That shouldn’t be news to anyone who isn’t a teenager now because we’ve all been teenagers. So many pressures in life feel like the end of the world when you are eighteen, and many can knock your whole world off track.

Tess is an 18-year-old whose whole world has been knocked off track. She lives in a tiny town in Newfoundland, in a house she technically owns as she inherited it when her mother passed away. The only person she has in the world is her mother’s boyfriend, who is moving on with his life and moving them both in with his new girlfriend.

She has become so desperate for some escape from her life that she has become stuck in it until she finds a man in her kitchen one day. The man is Danny, the son of the woman she now shares a home with, and ne’er do well folk singer who ghosted the town twenty years prior.

The attraction that forms is, in a word, problematic. Partly this is due to the age difference, but it’s because Tess latches on to him as the one person who seems to have escaped the life she feels trapped in.

Continue reading “Review: ‘Body and Bones’ charts a painful coming of age story against a Newfoundland backdrop”