Name of the book: A PLACE CALLED HERE
Author: CECELIA AHERN
Pages: 484
At 10 years of age, Jenny-May Butler went missing causing
eyes to fill with tears and parents to hug their children an extra bit
tighter before they sent them off to bed. She was in everyone’s dreams and
everyone’s prayers. She was never found-
not her body, not a trace of her, it was as though she had disappeared into
thin air. No suspicious characters had been seen lurking around, no CCTV was
available to show her last movements. There was no witness, no suspect. It was
a blank case for everyone.
Sandy Shortt was a girl who remains aloof from everyone, be
it her classmates, be it her neighbours or be it her own parents. She missed
Jenny-May, the idea of her going missing and wondered if she was somewhere
nearby, throwing stones at someone else and laughing loudly.
After Jenny-May going missing, she took to searching for everything that
has been mislaid. When her favourite pair of shocks went missing she turned the
house upside down when her worried parents looked on, not knowing what to do
but eventually settling on helping her. It disturbed her that frequently
missing possessions were nowhere to be found.
She thought about the odd pairs of shocks as much as Mrs.
Butler worried about her daughter. Perhaps this is why she chooses to run a
missing people agency where she used to search for all the missing people who disappeared
in the thin of air.
Sandy Shortt, six foot one, ever since she was a child, she
was towering just above everyone. She could never get lost in a shopping
center, could never hide properly, was never asked to dance at discos and
perhaps was the only teenager who wasn’t aching to buy her first favourite pair
of heels.
According to Sandy Shortt, her parents called her Sandy
because she was born with a head of sandy- coloured hair, which later on turned
into back coloured coal. They didn’t know either that those cute podgy little
legs would soon stop kicking and start growing at such a fast rate, towering above anything.
As for her obsession of finding lost things, her parents ask
her to meet Dr. Burton who is a counsellor and can help her with that. Sandy was
sad because she thought her parents can’t understand her. Though she agreed on
meeting with Dr. Burton, inside her mind, she didn’t want to go for counselling
to a person who sounded like an old man. Although after meeting the counsellor,
she changed her mind because Dr. Burton was more of Dr. Gregory than Dr. Burton
as he didn’t look that old and his first name matched with him more than his
last.
After 24 years of Jenny-May missing, she picked up a case of
Donal Ruttle, who is the younger brother of Jack Ruttle. Searching and going
through the files, she reached a place where she found the five students who
went missing after disappearing during a school camping trip in Roundwood,
Country Wicklow, sixteen years ago.
Strange she went to the village with Helena, one among the
five students who showed her the way towards the entrance of the village only
to find more people who went missing. She was curious to know why these people
came here without any information and without and cue leaving their family to spend
sleepless nights crying and thinking about them.
To her surprise when Helena told that no things can go
missing from here, she was kept agape because the watch she was wearing on her
wrist went missing while she came to the place called here.
Bobby who was the person taking care of the things that were 'lost and found', was another person whom Sandy was searching in her missing cases.
Discovering the fact that all her missing socks, her teddy, her purple diary
which she lost while she was at her home was stored by Bobby she felt a strange
feeling.
After discovering so many people from her missing list, the
one on her priority now being Jenny-May, she found her in another village lead
by Bobby and Helena where she forgot all the hard feeling of childhood and let
the emotions stored flow like tears. They both hugged each other and took a picture with the Polaroid camera which Bobby gave from the lost and found
things.
When she reached her own place, Glin in Limerick, almost no
one believed her until Dr. Burton got the picture of Sandy and Jenny-May
together.
This story will not only make you entangled with the vastness of the place called here where all the missing things and the missing
people go but also with the search that Sandy runs to find all the missing
cases.
Read the story to know where Sandy Shortt disappears. And
was she successful in finding all the people she has wished for? Did she find Donald Ruttle?
Overall rating: 4/5
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