A Difficult Childhood
If You Find Me, by Emily Murdoch, is a somewhat difficult book to read, but fascinating nonetheless. As it opens, we see Carey busy with dinner preparation for herself and her little sister, Jenessa, outside the old camper they call home, in a clearing deep inside a national forest in Tennessee. They live there with their mother, a mentally ill meth addict, who is absent more than she’s present, “running errands” in town and leaving the girls to fend for themselves, on a diet of canned food and whatever they can catch or scrounge from the woods around them. Carey has been there since she was about six, and Jenessa was born in the woods, so this subsistence-style life is mostly all they have known.
Then, one day, after their mother has been gone a worryingly long time and they are almost down to their last can of beans, two strangers show up in their clearing, and suddenly everything in life changes, as they are taken out of their hideaway and into the real world of people, bright lights and (for Carey) high school.
Now Carey has to confront her past and decide whether her abduction by her mother was really for the reasons her mother told her all these years. She also has to deal with the secret, the dreadful thing that caused her sister Jenessa to quit talking almost a year ago. But if she opens up about all of it, will her new family reject her as her mother has?
The writing style and the Tennessee dialect immediately pulled me in to this story. I related to the fact that these children (particularly Carey) were mostly self-educated; she spoke in an old-fashioned, stilted way that you would learn from books, not from contact with other people, and that’s what I was like growing up—I absorbed language from all the books I read, and came out with unexpected anachronisms that made people laugh at me because I learned my language and grammar from Regency romance novels, fairy tales, and classic poetry. I loved how the author infused the book with references to Winnie the Pooh, Tennyson, Dickinson, etc. The story was gripping, and I appreciated that although terrible things happened, they were mostly revealed visually by snippets of scenes, not by bald descriptions.
I did have some trouble with some factual things in the book that didn’t ring true. The child welfare system works a certain way, and the author violated many of the rules that it follows. I can see why she did it, but to sentimentalize and soften parts of its functionality in favor of her plot actually did the book a disservice, in my opinion. Otherwise, though, the story rings true. Carey’s conflicting emotions, guilt, fear, the secretive behavior, the inability to let herself believe she deserves good things, the confusion at letting go of the picture her mother had painted of her father, all felt genuine. This was a deeply affecting book. Grades 9 and up would be the appropriate age group.
Also, kudos on the cover–this girl is just as described in the book (except she might have had brown eyes?).
The Book Adept 