Unravel

Rebecca has the feeling that she and her father Joe are always moving. She just gets used to a place, meets the neighbours, even forms some tentative friendships, when Joe will announce that it "isn't safe" or that So-and-So is getting "too nosy", and they'll be off, sometimes even in the middle of the night, and always without saying good-bye. Since Joe homeschools Rebecca, there are no inquisitive teachers to be satisfied or forms to be filled out, and, up to a few months ago, he has been quite assiduous in assigning her books to read, essays to write, and art exhibitions to visit and report on. But the apartment on Sullivan Street has been different. Nicer. Friendlier. They've been there for almost a year, and their landlady, Mrs Marchiano is teaching Rebecca how to cook. Rebecca even has an almost best friend! Then comes the inevitable. She tries to argue; she says "No"; she asks questions about her mother (dead in child-birth; Rebecca's "fault" because she was such a big baby); and about her grandparents and some things which she thinks she "remembers" but Joe says she couldn't because she was too young when they left British Columbia where she was born. This time, Joe answers, grudgingly, but then later one of her favourite things is destroyed, and she knows he has done it. A punishment for her "nosiness". But the move happens anyway.

However, Rebecca is now 13 and no longer prepared to accept all the things that aren't adding up. She has memories that don't jibe with her father's reports. In her new, horrible, apartment, she makes an unexpected friend in a very chic and wonderful-looking woman in the flat above theirs who hires her to do errands and help her with small jobs. Now she has somewhere to run and someone to turn to, and the next time Joe says they are moving, she does just that, taking refuge in Phoebe's flat in her absence, and then, when Phobe returns, Rebecca tells her her entire story, as far as she knows/remembers it.

Phoebe has troubles of her own, having just had a double mastectomy and chemotherapy (which the reader picks up on though Rebecca is too engrossed in her own troubles), but she takes on Rebecca's and discovers that Joe's stories have been just that. Lies, in other words, and he has now disappeared. A few days later, the two of them go down to the police station, and Rebecca is introduced to Grace from the Missing Persons Bureau. Rebecca says, not unreasonably, "So you've found Joe?", and Grace replies, "No, we've found you." Abducted at age three. Now suddenly in possession of a mother, stepfather, half-brother, grandparents ... all the things she has been missing!

It is no wonder this first-person novel begins saying that you can't write a story using the White Knight's formula -- "begin at the beginning and go on until you come to the end. Then stop" -- when you have spent so much of your life not knowing your beginning. So readers are thrown into the middle of the story and only gradually become aware of what came before what. This approach might have been confusing, but, in fact, Jennings has the narrative firmly in hand and guides readers through its ins and outs at a pace that keeps readers interested throughout. While Unravel is not quite a page-turner, it is certainly gripping. I’ve read about children being abducted by a parent or sometimes grandparent, and about how computers can "age" a picture of a child to an uncanny likeness of the teen, but this story brings it home in a particularly vivid way. Frankly, it sends shivers up the spine of a parent (me), and teenagers will find it riveting.