By: Melody Wolf
Richard Bruce’s Sometime Child opens in a place of rupture rather than reassurance. A violent encounter in a New York City alleyway brings three strangers into sudden and irreversible proximity, setting off a chain of events that resists easy moral categories. From its first pages, the novel establishes itself not as a conventional story of crime and consequence, but as an inquiry into how people shaped by vastly different circumstances might still find moments of understanding, accountability, and change.
Bruce makes no attempt to soften the entry point. He introduces upheaval before context, forcing readers to sit with discomfort before insight arrives. His intention, he explains, was to establish a ‘before’, without hinting at the fact that the lives of each of the characters would change in unexpected ways as they interacted with each other. At that stage, he adds, he did not expect readers to feel “much in the way of hope for either of the assailants.”
That lack of early hope is central to the novel’s emotional architecture. Transformation, when it comes, feels hard-won rather than inevitable.
Although Sometime Child is fiction, its emotional truth is shaped by Bruce’s real-world experiences. In 1999, he volunteered with a program serving teenagers navigating unsafe neighborhoods, unstable home lives, and under-resourced schools. One early relationship proved especially formative.
His first student warned him that visiting her home would not be safe. “As I spent time with her, I came to understand the difficulties she faced firsthand,” Bruce recalls. Encounters like these did not translate directly into plot, but they informed the novel’s ethical center, an awareness of how quickly children are judged for circumstances beyond their control.
At the center of Sometime Child is an unlikely connection between a successful attorney and two teenage boys whose lives have unfolded along sharply divergent paths. Their relationship becomes a means of examining class not as theory, but as lived experience, one that quietly influences opportunity, expectation, and self-perception.
Bruce is explicit about what he hopes readers will see: that young people, regardless of circumstance, “have the same dreams and hopes.” The novel asks what might become possible if individuals from “wildly different backgrounds” were “willing to spend the time and place to listen to each other.”
Listening, in Bruce’s view, is not passive. It is an act with consequences. “Those who have so little may find ways to improve their lives, while those with so much can find ways to be kind to others,” he says, “so it can be a win/win.” In the novel, connection operates not as charity, but as mutual reckoning.
Forgiveness runs through Sometime Child, but Bruce refuses to romanticize it. Forgiveness does not erase harm or absolve responsibility. Instead, it is framed as a choice to release what corrodes from within. “Holding grudges is an extra weight that serves no purpose,” he says.
New York City is more than a backdrop in Sometime Child; it is an unspoken force. Bruce portrays a city where physical proximity does not guarantee understanding, where people can live minutes apart yet inhabit entirely different realities. The setting “allowed me to portray my main characters living or working just minutes apart but in totally different environments…environments that put a mark on their lives…good or bad, that can be difficult to shed.”
The title Sometime Child carries both ache and promise. Children raised in poverty are constantly confronted with what they lack, through media, culture, and daily exposure to lives they cannot access. Yet, Bruce emphasizes, their aspirations are no different from those of any other child. He chose the title to reflect the belief that “SOMETIME their dreams will come true,” and that there is “a path that can make a child’s dreams come true.”
While Sometime Child does not shy away from violence, inequality, or loss, Bruce was intentional about resisting despair. “Despite all the turmoil and challenges in the world today…I wanted my book to be upbeat,” he explains, “but at the same time, I wanted my book to be based in reality.” His aim was to “walk that line between evil and goodness,” trusting readers to grapple with both.
In essence, the novel extends an invitation rather than a verdict—to pause judgment, to practice empathy, and to recognize shared humanity where it is least expected. As Bruce puts it, he hopes readers will come away understanding “how important it is to avoid pre-judging and be empathetic to troubled children born into environments they would not have chosen had they been able to do so.”
Sometime Child is available now on Amazon.
