Book Review / A Place Called Here by Cecelia Ahern

Sometimes it takes losing everything to truly find yourself... Since Sandy Shortt's childhood classmate disappeared twenty years ago, Sandy has been obsessed with missing things. Finding what is lost becomes her single-minded goal--from the lone sock that vanishes in the washing machine to the car keys she misplaced. It's no surprise, then, that Sandy's life's work becomes finding people who have vanished from their loved ones. 

Sandy's family is baffled and concerned by her increasing preoccupation. Her parents can't understand her compulsion, and she pushes them away further by losing herself in the work of tracking down these missing people. She gives up her life in order to offer a flicker of hope to devastated families...and escape the disappointments of her own. Jack Ruttle is one of those devastated people. It's been a year since his brother Donal vanished into thin air, and he has enlisted Sandy Shortt to find him. But before she is able to offer Jack the information he so desperately needs, Sandy goes missing too...and Jack now finds himself searching for his brother and the one woman who understood his pain. 

One minute Sandy is jogging through the park, the next, she can't figure out where she is. The path is obscured. Nothing is familiar. A clearing up ahead reveals a camp site, and it's there that Sandy discovers the impossible: she has inadvertently stumbled upon the place-- and people--she's been looking for all her life, a land where all the missing people go. A world away from her loved ones and the home she ran from for so long, Sandy soon resorts to her old habit again, searching. Though this time, she is desperately trying to find her way home...
 

Published:     1st March 2012
Publisher:  HarperCollins
Goodreads :  Click here
Series or Stand-Alone:  Stand-Alone
Source:  Owned

 

 

BOOK REVIEW

 

This was a book was both fun and stressful in equal levels, but a very good novel overall!

We follow Sandy who has always had a need to find the missing, whether that will be an odd sock, a missing coat or a missing person.  That need is more of a compulsion rather than a choice.  She takes on a job to find someone's brother and visits their town but then she goes missing.  

We follow two people's perspectives here.  Both the perspective of the brother of that who is missing and that of Sandy, wherever she may be.  This has to be my favourite part, the split perspectives as you are seeing through the eyes of the brother who on the one hand is desperate to find out what happened to his brother and also curious to find out why Sandy did not turn up to their initial meeting.  His curiousity peaked even more when he finds Sandy's abandoned car.  On the other hand we follow Sandy's perspective.  I won't go into too much about this as I don't want to spoil it for those who have not read this book yet but this side of the story definately had me puzzled for a long while!

I really gripping mystery that I would highly recommend.