Weekend Pick for July 22, 2022

Weekend Pick for July 22, 2022

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Another weekend pick from an amazing Shelly Shaffer. Embark on a self-discovery journey with Ava Dellaira and her characters.  Happy reading!

​From Ava Dellaira, In Search of Us takes readers on a journey to Los Angeles, California. Angie, a mixed-race seventeen-year-old, has had little to no relationship with any extended family outside of her mother Marilyn. Marilyn is a hardworking, single, White mother—with a traumatic backstory she doesn’t understand. Angie knows something is missing from her life—and her father’s side of the family might hold the key to her identity.
 

The book is written as a parallel story told from the viewpoints of this mother and daughter pair.  There is a seventeen year gap between the storylines, with Marilyn’s story almost always being told in flashbacks from seventeen years earlier—before Angie was born. Angie’s story, on the other hand, takes place in present day. For readers, learning about Marilyn’s teen life helps to fill in the storyline, at times becoming dramatic irony as we know things that Angie doesn’t know yet.
 
Angie is in search of the truth about her father, who is a mystery to her—having been told that both her father and his brother (Angie’s uncle) died in a car accident before Angie was born. But Angie’s mom, Marilyn, is trying to protect Angie from the past by making a fresh start in New Mexico.

When Angie finds photographs of her teenage mother and father on the beach, she becomes even more curious about her mother’s past. She discovers that her uncle, a man named Justin, might actually be alive—she hopes (dreams) that her dad might also be living in Los Angeles and that she might be able to have a relationship with him. She talks her ex-boyfriend into driving her from Albuquerque to LA in search of her uncle—and the truth about her dad.
 
Readers will be thrown for a loop—like I was—when Angie’s mom finally tells the truth about why she lied to Angie for all those years.

This is a story of racism, White privilege, and tragedy that robs a young woman of a relationship with her paternal relatives for over seventeen years. But it’s also a story of hope and healing as Angie and her mom, Marilyn, find a new start. This book hit me in the gut when I finally learned the truth—as I’m sure it did to Angie as well. I love gritty, realistic books that help me to learn and grown as a person. This book did just that.
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I listened to it on audiobook, and I recommend that experience, as well. The audiobook was excellent. 

Till next week,
Shelly​