Synopsis
Winner of the Edgar Award! Careful planning and constant control is Claudineas protection. Order is her weapon. Sheas long buried her own needs and dreams to cover for her alcoholic mom. But when Mom suddenly disappearesaanother alcoholic binge?aseventeen-year-old Claudine finds herself all alone, and a much darker reality emerges from beneath years of angry denial and enabling behavior. And as the truth comes closer to the surface, Claudine must dig for the answers sheas always worked so hard to cover up.
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About the Author
Robin Merrow MacCready lives with her family in Maine. This is her first book.
From School Library Journal
Grade 8 Up–Claudine Carbonneau, a high-school senior in Deep Cove, ME, wakes up to find her alcoholic mother gone, leaving the teen to clean up their trashed home and to explain her mother's absence. As Claude attempts to carry on alone, it becomes apparent that readers aren't getting all the details of the night of the woman's disappearance, and that Claude is, in fact, an unreliable and unstable narrator. She tells her support group and her best friend, also the child of an alcoholic, that her mother has willingly checked into a rehab facility and convinces herself that this is true. She also displays increasingly advanced obsessive-compulsive tendencies as she attempts to order her life. Details of the mother-daughter relationship are revealed in awkwardly placed flashbacks, interior monologues, and letters; as a result, readers are effectively told, rather than shown, the key elements that would lead them to care about the protagonist. MacCready attempts to construct a layered, psychological mystery, building to a dramatic final scene in which truths are both literally and figuratively unearthed. Unfortunately, this first novel suffers from clumsy pacing, clichéd symbolism, and a preachy message about the need for children of alcoholics to accept their parents' role in their own recovery. The shocking final scene is overly dramatic and unsatisfying, and Claude's realizations about herself and her mother are not believable.–Riva Pollard, The Winsor School Library, Boston
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