Finished October 29, 2013
Synopsis at Good Reads
Megan sees her daughter Emma everywhere. She's the little girl standing in the supermarket, the child waiting for the swings at the playground, the girl with ice cream dripping down her face. But it's never Emma.
Emma's been missing for two years.
Unable to handle the constant heartache of all the false sightings, Megan's husband threatens to walk away unless Megan can agree to accept Emma is gone. Megan's life and marriage is crumbling all around her and she realizes she may have to do the thing she dreads most: move on.
When Megan takes a photo of a little girl with an elderly couple at the town fair, she believes it to be her missing daughter. Unable to let go, she sets in motion a sequence of events that could destroy both families lives.
My review at Good Reads
4 of 5 stars
This was a Book Club read for me. I enjoy Book Clubs because it introduces me to styles I wouldn't normally read. I realize my taste in reading is usually dictated more by my tomboy side.
Half of Finding Emma was an inspection of the minds of Emma's parents, especially her mother, Megan, when their toddler daughter disappears after venturing out the front door into the front yard on her own. It also describes the different ways they react to their family trauma and are still reacting two years after their daughter’s disappearance. While I personally haven’t observed any close friends or relatives in the midst or a child disappearance or abduction, I have watched parents close to me deal with the grief of a child’s death. I found the behavior of both Megan and husband, Peter, to be very believable and how those behaviors affected their relationship and relationships with their two other daughters to be very real.
The other half of the book tells of grandparents raising their granddaughter, Emmie. The older couple’s daughter, Mary, was a runaway. In the beginning of the book it’s understood that Mary sent Emmie to be raised by her parents. Mary was in and out of a safe house where she was dealing with drug addiction. Emmie was now being raised by her grandparents who adored and cherished her. Grandma, Dottie, was very overprotective of her granddaughter, vowing to not repeat the mistakes she made with Mary. Grandfather, Jack, was supportive of his wife’s need to be a little overprotective of their granddaughter, at first anyway, and was very active with his beloved grandchild.
Later in the book, as Peter and Megan’s marriage is crumbling and Dottie’s mental state starts to really falter evidence about how it is that Emmie came to live with them starts to surface to Jack. I admit it was a good story but I’d already figured out what was going on; except I was wrong! I love a story that pivots into a completely valid explanation I wasn’t expecting and that is definitely what I got.
1 comment:
I can understand the high rating for Finding Emma, but I do not want to read the book. It would be like re-living events in my own life. I went through hell when my daughter was missing. I saw her everywhere and in every young girls face. I looked for her for so many years, but finally had to move on. A psychic told me I would see her again in "5". She could not say what "5". 12 and a half years after she went missing, my phone rang at 5 p.m. Guess who? Yup! It was one of the best days of my life.
Nani, you have a fabulous day, hugs, Edna B.
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