Krishna
The narrator, Laura, is in a police station cell when the book opens. That person is in for a crime – but does not think that it was a crime as it was done to protect her son Daniel. He is the only one she loved, not even her second husband Ian, whom she married to give a father figure to Daniel.
Daniel Bateman is drinking and fighting with Tim. He is pissed upon learning that his ‘supposed’ mother was not his mother and had kidnapped him. His love, Maria is not his anymore; even his surname is not Bateman! He is twenty six and he was kidnapped when he was four. Ian Bateman, his father was a drunk and a slob. He was a good looking man but that was not a gift from his ‘mother’ either. Laura Bateman, his supposed mother, was the object of his ire.
Meanwhile Laura reminisces about her drunk mother, who was cared for by herself and her grandma until the grandma fell ill and could not. The social service people recommended a foster home for Laura, and the mother choked in her own vomit, when she was pie eyed drunk, and suffocated to death shortly thereafter.
When Laura was seventeen and was Laura Covey, she meets Matthew Hancock who works in a branch of Sainsbury’s and sweeps her off her feet. She falls desperately in love with him. She has regular sex with him and once without a condom. Yes she gets pregnant. Matt is planning for a famous career in London and she, of course, has been a doormat all this time. He of course, wants her to get rid of it.
She leaves him instantly, coming to her senses about the lowlife he has been. But a person who agrees to look after her comes and rapes her. He was the foster father.
Now there is a lot going on in this story but here is the problem – the descriptions fall flat and you are NOT carried along with Laura or feel sorry for her. Really superficial descriptions irk you.
And David reveals to Kellie that he remembers without a shadow of a doubt different women looking after him when he was three or younger and he feels he belongs to them than with his mother and stepfather. His mother denies the whole thing, but he has this “gut feeling” that he cannot shake. I do understand the story and his intuition but how flaky are those memories?
I cannot say enough about the stilted conversations. The plot is good, I feel but marred by bad dialogs and generally bad narration, in my opinion. Even Kellie’s views about genetics is boring.
This is a dual POV story, alternating between Daniel and Laura. Laura gives birth when she is three weeks shy of eighteen and names the boy Daniel Mark Covey (taking her surname from the father as she was never married).
It gets absurd. So Daniel tries to find the truth. How? By concentrating hard on his hazy memory and trying to find more details this way! This explained why he felt coldness towards his mother – who was proud of him and loved him every day – and warmth when he thought of this “other woman”. Oh, come on!
The story picks up a bit, mercifully. Laura finds that the only person who was her support, her grandmother, is dead. (She has cancer). Now Laura is stuck in the home with no incoming money and a demanding child to look after.
Gran’s will leaves everything to Laura and she plans to move to Bristol after selling the house as soon as she is able. Get a job etc. But just a couple of days after Gran’s death, the baby dies a crib death. She is devastated.
She does not register Daniel’s death but secretly buries him in the forest.
Daniel’s “intuitions” go from bad to worst. First he has a DNA test by stealing his mom’s hair from the brush and having a DNA test, forging her signature on the request form. OK, let us say we understand it. When the results come in negative, he goes and confronts his mom. How? “I have always hated you!”. For a mother, who, even if you assume she is not your real mother, gave you nothing but love. Then he goes hunting for who his real family is. There, when he finds a newspaper article from about the time he was four or so, he finds a boy gone missing and “instantly knows that his mother has kidnapped him”. Talk about absurdity. Would it not be possible for a child to be accidentally switched in the hospital? This is what I mean when the storytelling (yes, including the plot now) irritates rather than entertains you.
He even brushes away all doubts “knowing that his instincts have been right”. Really? On what basis? Memory of the face when he was three? The “warm and fuzzy intuition” that they are where he belonged? Does this even sound right to you?
When he realizes that it is true, he is bursting to tell Katie. That ends in disaster as now Katie cannot be his girlfriend anymore. (Read the book to find out why). The one girl he genuinely loved is now snatched away from him because he was so adamant in finding out the truth. (I have several things to say about this but in the interests of not introducing spoilers, will refrain).
They realize that they have to break up. Katie decides to go to Australia, alone. And Daniel decides to go to the police to reveal that he was the kidnap victim of all those years ago.
Daniel meets his family – his talented family. His father is great with woodworks and his mother is fantastic with stone. His grandparents are wonderful. So Daniel is very bitter that he did not get an opportunity to grow up with them. His thought was ‘Why did it have to happen to me?’. Normal enough, sure.
His remedy for frustration is, first to drown himself in crates of beer and struggling with a hangover – this is even before he needed to go to the police – and second to screw mindlessly – a man, so that he knows it is meaningless release.
In the older story, you learn how Laura kidnapped Daniel, planning ahead and being helped by the unexpected departure of the nanny at just the wrong time! No surprise there (about the results of the effort because you know what happened way back early in the book).
She moves to London to dissolve in the human mass. With enough false leads at the cafe and with careful preparation (duplicate keys, a different slip on shoe to obscure footprints etc) she is successful.
She tries to erase Daniel’s memory of the past life, with patience and drilling. Since we know this part of the story from the beginning of the book, it seems to be a repetition, albeit with more details. But she remembers that Daniel never seemed to be affectionate with her, just withdrawn totally. So the feeling of the adult Daniel at the beginning of the book definitely is not a churlish reaction – but I still argue that it is a wee bit unnatural, especially since Daniel did not remember his past life until the suspicion dawned on him much later. Another plot contrivance? You wonder.
When Daniel comes back to meet his kidnapper (one last time) he drops a bombshell that brings her world crashing down. Laura married Ian Bateman purely to give a father figure to Daniel but they never bonded. Now, too late, she learns why.
She punishes the person responsible for Daniel’s misery – with Daniel’s pen as an unconventional weapon. (Sorry don’t want to put in any spoilers). It ends predictably, as the only way this book can end.
But I will say this : the last thirty pages or so lift the book from the dull dialog into something worth remembering and as a whole, the book reads much better than I initially thought.
One final nitpicking grouse : I still don’t know why this book is titled thus. Yes, the shoes do figure but as a very minor piece in the whole story. I am still scratching my head!!
5/10
— Krishna