Have You Seen Me?

Author : Sophie McKenzie
Title : Girl, Missing
Published : 14/07/2016
Pages : 320
Genre : Young Adult
Publisher : Simon & Schuster Children's UK

     Lauren is adopted and eager to know more about her mysterious past. But when she discovers shy may have been snatched from her family as a baby, her whole life suddenly feels like a sham. Why will no one answer her questions? How can she find her biological parents? And could her adoptive parents really have been responsible for kidnapping her?

    Recently I've been on a young adult kick again, so while I was going over the shelves at the bookstore I came across this book. It must be hard to be an adopted child never being sure what your biological family gave you up. With this book, the author poses the question, what if they didn't. Suppose you were taken and they've' been looking for you ever since. This is not a question you can ask the people you are living with. Do you go to the police and start screaming your head off. What if they don't believe you and you are left having to go back to these people. Or do you set off on the trail of your real parents and hope you can find them before anyone realizes what you are up to.

     The author delivers to us a very strong wild fourteen-year-old. Lauren is determined to get to the bottom of where she comes from and who she is. She is written in a very believable way and to me, she felt like a lot of other girls her age. Despite her strong will like someone in their teenage years, she shows a great deal of unease in her self. It is this doubting that sets her off on her journey. As with a lot of teenagers she doesn't always think her decisions through working more on impulse than anything else. This, as you can imagine, leads to a whole mess of unforeseen consequence. Along the way her best friend Jam comes with her, This is entirely voluntary on his part and to be honest I think he would have followed her to the end of the world. Though for me he did lack some depth that would have helped to flesh out his character.  

     Due to the short chapters in the book, the story flows quickly and leaps from one situation to the next. It allowed the author to build tension up quickly and keep it going right to the end. But that for me is part of where the problems are with this book. How many parents would drop everything to go on a holiday to America just because their teenage daughter wants to go on a whim? It all seemed to be a bit too easy, especially after they had just had an argument where Lauren demand to know where she came from. There seemed to be a lot of conclusions that she reaches very quickly and to some extend easily. I wonder if in part this is down to the book being fairly short, It doesn't allow for her difficulties to have time to actually cause problems in reaching her goals. this is very much more evident in the first half of the book. Would she not in real life have been caught before she even manages to buy her plane ticket at the airport in America? The second half, however, did start to show some promise when her actions start to have some real-world consequence especially for the parents she has spent most of her life living with. The bond she forms with  Madison is one that really showed promise and the connect a great deal as they both felt out of place in their lives.  

     For me, this is where the book held it's own showing the struggles of trying to fit into a life you were not brought up to be a part of. The bombshell of a child you think is probably dead one day showing up at your door is one I can't even begin to imagine.  Annie her real mother is left feeling very torn between the reality of the situation and her memory's of the little girl she lost. I struggled with my feeling for this book and I fully realize that I'm not the target audience for the book. And in such I'm more prone to picking holes in the plot. I would say that she does raise some big questions by the end of the book, and the repercussions of everything that takes place would stay with these people for a long time. I just was left feeling it could have done with a bit more fleshing out and allowing the plot time to breath.