Odd Socks, Moving On and Getting Lost -MC

This week’s review is of another girly surreal story (but not a freebie from a magazine) that (again) made me cry with it’s sheer bittersweetness. “A Place called Here” revolves around missing people who are never found, and who disappeared without a reason.

Sandy Shortt (a leggy brunette, the irony is not lost on her) is someone obsessed with finding things. Ever since a girl from her class disappeared when she was young Sandy’s been compulsively looking for everything that goes missing. That sock that definitely went into the washing machine but never came out, that bear that she definitely put into her rucksack, those keys...

Her compulsion means that she’s driven everyone away, and the only thing she can focus on as a career is running an agency that specialises in finding people. She has made it her life’s duty to look for the people the police have given up on.

She is contacted by Jack Ruttle, whose brother disappeared on a night out a year ago, and for whom the sleepless nights and gradual distancing of his wife are getting to be too much. Sandy is his last hope, and he needs her to find his brother.

I began the book absolutely loving Sandy’s determinedness, and her single mindedness (something I massively lack) made her an absolute heroine. But the book progresses with brief flashbacks and slowly you begin to see just how much of a problem it is for her, and how the loss of, well everything, has become an itch she can’t get rid of, because some things are just never found.

Until she goes for a jog one morning and ends up... Here.

She’s not in Limerick, Ireland anymore, that’s for certain.

She’s in the place where all those missing things go, a world of odd socks and lost clothes... and everyone she’s been looking for. Except for Jack’s brother, and the girl who started it all.

The idea that sparked this story is simple enough, but Cecelia Ahern (who else?) really pulls it out of the bag with this amazing story born out of such a simple annoyance (that bloody sock!) which I love because there is little to no romance (unless you REALLY squint) and more of the story is used to develop the characters.

When Sandy disappears and fails to make her appointment with Jack, he begins trying to find her, and comes across her car, abandoned at the roadside with his brother’s file inside. Knowing something is wrong, he begins trying to contact her close ones, only finding people like himself who are looking for those who are lost.

The story switches points of view seamlessly, from Jack’s search for Sandy, which takes him on a journey through grief, eventually winding up on her parents’ doorstep, and Sandy’s quest to get back to the world she’s left.

This story is a touching, sincere tale of putting the past behind you and moving on in your own time, and I cried in several different places (of course) not least when Jack visits a woman who lost her son to “Here” and she forgets the sound of her son’s laugh, when at the same time, Sandy and the boy are talking and hear his laugh in the distance as it goes “missing”, and the boy realises that his mother is slowly forgetting him despite constantly watching those home videos and preserving his room just the way he left it.

The emotional journey of everyone in the book is fascinating, and it’s definitely one I could have read in one sitting if I’d not been viciously restraining myself with thoughts of deadlines.

Cecelia Ahern is quickly becoming one of my favourite authors and I hope she writes until I go blind with old age (or go “missing” :P )

MangaCat out!