Book Four: The Year of Fog

Book Four: The Year of Fog
Finished: January 5th
Pages: 466

Photographer and soon-to-be stepmom takes girl to the beach, loses sight of her, and spends a year trying to find her again.
I'm not particularly sure what I feel about this book. I didn't particularly like it, but I couldn't stop reading. What does that mean? I had to find out what happened to Emma, the little girl, but at the same time wanted to punch everyone: the narrator, the predictable police officer, the angry dad, the stereotypical helpful neighbor, the random surfer girl.
I can understand, objectively, the feeling of guilt that drove Abby to search endlessly for Emma. I can even understand that the guilt of losing someone's child would change you into an obsessive crazy person. But I just don't understand why this book had to be 466 pages long. I think that the idea was a good one, but execution was not what I would have done at all.
I enjoyed the chapters devoted to how memory works, and would have liked to see more of those. As a photographer, I found the discussion of photography to be lacking in sincerity and overly technical, and the details given too specific for most non-photographers to have any clue what she was talking about.
If I had written the book, I probably would have numbered the chapters after the number of days that Emma was missing, while not numbering the chapters about photography, or memory, or the chapters that repeat the day that she disappeared without really adding anything else to the narrative.
Certainly, after reading The Gathering, and even The Hours, there are so many ways to make a story more emotionally impactful than simply repeating the same action over and over. I think that there were risks that the author was not willing to take.

Do I need to put spoiler alert here? Haha, no, I love ruining things for other people.

The ending was safe. The ending was trite. It was as if the author was afraid of taking the step that would have been braver: to let Emma die. It seemed almost convenient, "everyone has given up except for me! I will find her! Let's go to Costa Rica?" What makes Abby so smart, so willing to take risks, and then to simply find her on a beach? It felt like Richmond wanted a happy ending more than she wanted a realistic ending. Did I appreciate that Jake and Abby's relationship fell apart? Yes. That was necessary, that was real. Do I understand why he wouldn't let Abby see her even after she went to all those lengths to find her and save her? Not really, but I suppose if someone lost my child I would probably never want to see them again either, and certainly if someone else found my child for me, after I believed that they were dead, I wouldn't want to see them either, because the sight of them would have me feeling guilty that someone else had the strength to go on believing when I didn't.

I'm not going to say that this was the worst book I've ever read, or even the worst book that I had to read for book club, I mean, The Dante Club and Firefly Lane are both much worse, but I don't think that I would recommend this book to anyone, and that's certainly saying something.

Good Reading,
Caitlin