The Last Child

The Last Child
By John Hart

This is definitely a book I would take to the beach and if not beach time, then read it while riding the bus, on a train, on a plane, on vacation, but don’t read it before you go to bed, because you might not get to sleep! The last few chapters had me sitting on the edge of my seat, I couldn’t put it down. I was out of town for work and the minute my meeting was over, I would rush up to my hotel room, order room service and settle in with book in hand and food in mouth.

The story centers around Johnny, whose twin sister is kidnapped a year earlier and his desperate search for her. All of twelve, his search is methodical, exhausting, bordering on calling the magical forces whose belief in talismans and totems serve to sustain him in what would otherwise be a hopeless, futile search for any adult. But Johnny believes. truely believes, irregardless that his mother can’t cope with the loss of her daughter and the desertion of her husband, and gets through each day in a fog of pills, tangled in an abusive relationship with the town’s most powerful man. There’s the detective whose inability to solve the case and his obsessions with Johnny’s mother haunts all corners of his professional and personal life.

A tightly woven story which keeps you biting your nails, hoping against hope that somewhere out there Johnny will find out what happened to his sister, his mother will come to grips with her grief and the detective will be able to mark the case closed.

Book Review-A Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond

This story is a mother's worst nightmare. You glance away and in that one minute of inattention, you lose your life. You lose your child. How does one deal with something like that? The story's been done before, Deep End of the Ocean, by Jacquelyn Mitchard, which they made into a great movie, The Adam Walsh Story, heartbreakingly played by JoBeth Williams as the mother, and Kate Nelligan as the brave mother in Without A Trace. For this story, it centers around Abby, who isn't even Emma's mother, but who is engaged to her father and finds herself in that terrible situation. I think maybe in this case it would be a much greater case of loss and sorrow, to lose someone else's child, how could you live with yourself? How could you ever forgive yourself, even if everyone else does? Abby and Emma are shelling for sand dollars on the shores of Ocean Beach, where a foggy haze lingers over the sky. Abby looks away from Emma to take a photograph of a seal pup. When she looks up, Emma is nowhere to be found. Thus starts the heart wrenching search, a story of realization and determination. A story of faith and hope even when it seems everything is lost. A story of discovery and justice. Every street scene evokes the mood and atmosphere of my beloved city by the bay, San Francisco. Every chapter would elicit my response of I've been there, which is one of the reasons why I loved this book so much.

As with any good book, I hated for it to end, but hurry to the end I did, the suspense was killing me. I then turned it over to my 12 year old daughter to read. At first she was like, it's too slow, but with a little prodding, she quickly became engrossed and we had many a lively discussion on which actor would play who. She was so taken by the book, it became the subject of her final book project for her reading class in school. A great summer read and I can't wait till they turn this one into a movie!