Author: Ava Dellaira
Title: In Search of Us
I loved the author's first offering Love Letters to the Dead. I loved this inventive novel and knew I had to pick up the second book by Ava as soon as it came out. I was already in middle of another book when this landed into my kindle on being launched. So it took me a few days to get to it.
I started reading the book and felt a little disoriented, I could not really get my mind into it. I wondered if this book would be a bad follow up to the wonderful first one. But as soon as I reached page 24, I found myself melting into it. I paused and retraced my steps from the first. This time round I had no problems hooking in.
Marilyn is a single mother who has struggled to raise her daughter, Angie. She has risen from being a waitress at a local diner in Albuquerque to being a bank manager. She is eager to let her daughter have all the love and care that was denied to her by her mother. When she is sixteen Angie discovers some pictures of her father that her mother had kept from her. This makes her dig around and find out that her father's brother is alive. She wants to find out more and takes off to Los Angeles to search for her uncle.
One of the first things that occurred to me was that this was a little like Gilmore Girls, with more angst and less humor. There are some similarities of course. Like Lorelai, Marilyn is 17 when she finds herself pregnant. They are both single mothers trying to raise their daughters without the intervention of their families. But that's where the similarities end. There is nothing open about Angie's parentage. Marilyn has kept many things from her daughter.
Angie is biracial as her father was an African American. This has often resulted in problems for Angie as people did not immediately assume that Marilyn and Angie are mother and daughter, especially as the father is absent.
The story is told in the voices of Marilyn and Angie, when they were/are at the age seventeen. So we go back in time for Marilyn's story and come back to the present for Angie's. Marilyn's story is about her deep and abiding love for James, her neighbor, who is able to make her forget her miserable life and plan a hopeful future. In current times, Angie is on the way to Los Angeles in search of her uncle Justin. She hopes he will be able to lead her to her father James and also provide the missing pieces of her past.
The story is so well crafted and so well told that I was loath to put down the book. I kept racing through it and completed the book in two days, a sort of a record for me in recent times. The finale, the reason why Marilyn ran away from everyone when she found herself pregnant with James' child is well worth the wait to find out. The racism that James and his daughter Angie encountered is heart rending.
I loved the love story of Marilyn and James. Marilyn's feelings of being in love, of being in lust are so well expressed. The best part of this book is the image of these innocent children exploring life and wanting good things for each other.
The present time love story between Sam and Angie was quite unnecessary I feel. Angie wanted to know about her father to feel more complete, it should not have tied up to her inability to open up to Sam. Manny lurking in the background as someone who has a long time crush on Marilyn is a bit of a cardboard cut out. Cherry and Miguel are there for convenience. Angie, Marilyn, James, Justin, Marilyn's uncle and mother are the well fleshed out characters. They are the ones who are really integral to this beautiful story.
What I did not like so much was the neat wrapping up at the end. I guess I would have liked something left a little open to interpretation. Once the truth was out, the characters should have had a little more flexibility than falling into predictable slots.
I will be thinking about 17 year old, beautiful, full of promise, aspirational couple James and Marilyn cavorting on the beach for a long long time.
No comments:
Post a Comment