Book Review: A Finders-Keepers Place
Title: A Finders-Keepers Place
Author: Ann Haywood Leal
Publisher: Henry Holt, 2010
Synopsis: Most eleven year old kids are worried about the grade on their spelling test and who they sit next to during lunch. Fifth grader Esther Page is not most eleven year olds–she’s got to figure out how to keep her family together.
Target Audience: 10 -13 year olds? We have it in the children’s department.
Review: This was a very quick read; I pulled it off of our cart of new books at the library and was invested in the story from pretty early on. Eleven year old Esther and her eight year old sister Ruth are barely keeping it together, covering for their mother’s erratic and frightening behavior. Valley, their mother, is either sunk into a three day sleep induced by the little yellow pills she keeps around or following one of her notions. Underlying the strange behavior is a mean streak that has been hanging around their mother for six year, since their father left. If all that isn’t bad enough, teachers at school are starting to ask questions. So are the neighbors. Esther can see a bad thing coming a mile away and she needs to come up with a solution, fast. Even though she was only four the last time she saw her father, Esther just knows that things would be better if she and Ruth could find him and bring him back. The story follows the girls as they struggle with their mother’s increasingly manic behavior and attempt to find out what happened to their father. As you might imagine, the truths the girls discover are not happy ones. The book ends in a less bad place than it began, but overall it’s a sad and frustrating story.
Questions/Issues I had:
Why was the book set in 1973? That seemed like such an odd choice to me. I haven’t figured out the importance of the story being set in that decade–nothing in the story screamed seventies to me and while dates did come up–1966 in particular since that is when their father left–those dates weren’t really set in actual time. They were more like placeholders. Without the specific mention of the dates, I would have thought this was a fairly contemporary story. Or been happy with the vague, some place, some time kind of setting.
The whole time I was reading the story, I sympathized with Esther’s desire to keep everything together, but I kept waiting for an adult to step in and take a little bit of control of the situation. That NEVER happened. As the story progresses we see that Valley is actually abusive to the girls. Ruth has developed a stealing problem. They hardly have anything to eat and in fact grab food out of the dumpsters. The one adult “friend” that they know–Aunt Dode, a sometimes friend of their mother–gives them money for coffee and three days later brings over a tuna noodle casserole because it finally occurred to her that they might be hungry. Ford, the nineteen year old kid who runs an auto repair shop down the street, is the most responsible person around–getting the girls medicine when the Dumpster diving results in some mild food poisoning, leaving stuff out for their “finders-keepers” hunts.Their father, of course, turns out to have left for heaven–not some church down the street (Esther remembered that he was a preacher).
The problem of the mother: Valley repeatedly drives down the middle of the road, onto the sidewalk or just generally like a mad-woman. She is never pulled over. She leaves the girls at a flea market. No one notices. She takes all of the electrical appliances out of the house and leaves them on the curb. No one notices–or notices Esther trying to sneak back small things like the toaster. Valley knocks down walls in their house–including making holes in the exterior walls. No one notices. Rather than explain what had happened to their father, Valley just screams that he’s gone. At the end of the story, when asked by Esther why she never explained what happened to their father, Valley says that she did tell the girls. When they were four and 1.5, respectively. The story ends not with the girls being taken out of the situation or a social worker or therapist entering the scene to work with the family and keep Valley on track. Nope. Rather, it ends with Valley crying in the torn up kitchen, promising to take her pills. And Esther’s post-script is that she makes Valley take those pills right in front of her, every morning. I don’t understand how this resolved anything for those girls, or their mother, for that matter. Overall, very frustrating.
