If You Find Me
Emily Murdoch
Genre: YA
First published: 2013
Pages: 314
Language: English
Type: paperback
Rating: 3/5
In this book, we meet Carey, a fourteen-year-old who had spent a huge amount of her short life living in the woods with her drug addict of a mother. She also had to take care of her little sister for six years, from feeding her to teaching her clock and reading.
Their lives completely change when two strangers arrive at the place they call home and take them away. One of them turns out to be Carey's father, who, as Carey's mother claims, had beaten both her and the little Carey, which ended in the drug-addict bipolar mother taking her daughter away. The girls find themselves in a house with real beds, real food and, most importantly, real family, consiting of Carey's father, his wife and her daughter Delaney.
This book is really powerful. The whole concept is giving me chills because it could as well be a real-life story. Children disappear every single day, most of them are never found, and then there's Carey, who finds enough strength not only to survive, but to take care of another tiny human being as well. The story is absolutely amazing (I mean, if it's even possible to call such a tragic thing amazing), and even though I would have welcomed if there were mentioned more scenes from the girls' lives in the woods, I cannot really complain about the complexity of the story.
Another absolutely great thing are the characters. They're real. Like, real real. Their actions are in a way apt (according to the circumstances) and — even though I'm absolutely not justifying their actions — understandable. There's, for example, Delaney, who at first despises Carey for coming into her life, but is, in fact, a really nice girl who just basically feels like she comes second after her new stepsister — and, undestandably, doesn't like it. In overall, the few characters that appear in the book are well thought through, even though some of them would maybe deserve a bit more of page-time. It's the same like with the woods scenes. The book was kind of too short.
Now, you may be wondering: 'If she praises the book so much, why did she only give it four stars?'
The answer is pretty simple. (I actually considered giving the book three stars, but then I changed my mind.) I had a few issues with it. One of them being the writing style I couldn't somehow click with, even though there wasn't anything remotely bad with it. We just all have writing styles that don't fit us perfectly, and this was the case for me.
The second thing is, Murdoch somehow managed to confuse me at the beginning about the girls' ages and parents. All I could think of for the first seventy pages — which absolutely distracted me from what I was reading — was 'who the hell is Nessa's father?' because Emily made it clear there were a few years between Carey leaving her father and Nessa being born, but then Carey said something about the three of them sharing DNA, and maybe I'm just not as bright, but it actually did confuse me and I had to read the actual line confirming my theory before I believed it was true. There's a difference between giving readers space for deducation based on facts they're presented and confusing them by not telling them things straight away. (Wow, I sound really bitter, don't I? I'm not, I liked the book, really.)
So. I recommend this book to all of you. It's a really nice read full of wise words, pretty words and much, much more. Have any of you read this book? Are you planning on reading it? What are your thoughts on it? Share them with me in the comments!
