CY@CY Says Welcome to my dreamscape. Where a Lim is also a Ling.
Winner of the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, The Nowhere Child by Christian White is an engrossing and compelling read. The Australian writer spins a bizarre yarn of a two-year-old girl spirited away from her home in a small US Kentucky town in 1990 and raised to young adulthood halfway around the globe in Australia.
The thriller’s narrative switches back between the now and then, between Melbourne and Kentucky. The now sections are voiced by Kimberly Leamy, the shell-shocked Melbourne woman whose life has been upended by the news brought to her by an American stranger who claims to be her brother.
Kimberly Leamy is a photography teacher in Melbourne, Australia. Twenty-six years earlier, Sammy Went, a two-year old girl vanished from her home in Manson, Kentucky. The American stranger who contacts Kim is convinced she was that child. Kim cannot believe the woman who raised her, a loving social worker who died of cancer four years ago, is capable of child kidnapping.
On April 3rd, 1990, Jack and Molly Went’s daughter Sammy went missing from their Kentucky home. Already estranged since the Sammy’s birth, the couple drifted further apart as time passed. Jack did his best to raise and protect his other daughter Emma and son Stu while Molly found solace in her faith. The Church of the Light Within, a Pentecostal fundamentalist group who handle poisonous snakes as part of their worship, provided that faith. Without Sammy, the Wents eventually fell apart.
With realisation that she may be Sammy Went, Kim travels to America to meet a family she never knew she had and to solve the mystery of her abduction—a mystery that will take her deep into the dark heart of religious fanaticism where she must fight for her life against those determined to save her soul. The religious sect that her biological mother belongs to is scary and the novel exposes the dangers of religious fanaticism and brainwashing.
I finished reading The Nowhere Child in one day. It is very engaging. Each chapter ends with a bang! It’s the mini cliffhanger of each chapter that got me reading nonstop.