Review: "Finding Georgina" by Colleen Faulkner

Finding Georgina by Colleen Faulkner
Published February 2018 via Kensington
★★★

In the blink of an eye, Harper has everything she's wanted for the past fourteen years—she's found her daughter, who was abducted at the age of two. Georgina is living with her again; her ex-husband has moved back into the house; things will be perfect now. Except: Georgina isn't two anymore—she's sixteen, and as far as she can remember she's only ever had one parent, and that parent is not Harper. Harper has imagined Georgina coming home, but she's never imagined that Georgina wouldn't want to come home, or that she would want to be called by a different name, or that she wouldn't be Catholic.

I'm reminded, of course, of Twice Taken, which may be the reason I picked this up. I've read quite a few books along these lines, although I think always or almost always from the child's perspective. Here we get multiple perspectives—Harper, Georgina/Lilla, Harper's younger daughter JoJo. I can't say that I was entirely there for it. I don't think we got all that much into Georgina/Lilla's head, or into JoJo's, and Harper was...I don't know how to put this other than to say that she was so Midwestern Basic that I found her completely unrelatable. (At one point someone suggests to Harper that she might like a particular book because it's the sort that gets discussed a lot in book clubs, and that felt so very very on point.) I don't mean that as snark—if Midwestern Basic is your thing, fab! I know some lovely Midwestern Basic folks. (I just don't understand them very well.) And the characters in this book don't even live in the Midwest. But Harper is so locked into her limited worldview and her idea of how her daughter should fit into her family and into the world. I'm not a parent, and maybe if that someday changes I'll view books like this differently, but I would have found Harper easier to take if she'd tried earlier—much earlier—to meet her reunited child where she was rather than stubbornly holding on to the idea that they would be singing in the church choir and going to book club together, hand in hand.

It's fair to say that I wasn't really the reader for this book, but it's tackling some interesting questions. Every so often a real-life version of this crops up in the news, and it's hard to think beyond, just...how devastating for everyone involved. Even if there are clear rights and wrongs, there's no way forward that doesn't turn lives upside-down.