In my online
library, a quote described Answer Me, Answer ME as “An excellent portrayal of a young woman's search for
her true identity, a compelling story with just the right elements of
mystery and romance.” Sounded like a potentially good, young adult
book to me. I was sadly disappointed.
I listened to the audiobook, but I
don't think that made a difference to my experience of the story. I
can't imagine even the best narrator in the world making me anything
but sorry I wasted my time. The only difference is that I didn't
notice that the second “me” in the title is written “ME”
until looking it up to write this review.
A young woman, Bryn Kinney, is on her
own after her grandmother's death. Now at only 18 years old, she is
wondering if her grandmother, the woman who raised her, was really in
fact her biological grandmother at all and if she has any other
family out there somewhere. She has never known who her parents
were, so she sets off an a quest to search for answers about her
past.
I did not connect with this book at
all. I kept expecting something interesting to happen, for there to
be some twist for that “mystery” element, but it didn't happen.
No, you don't know who her parents are right away, but when things
are revealed it is very anti-climatic and if you are paying attention
you can figure most things out well ahead of time. As for what I
didn't figure out, I didn't feel a strong enough connection to Bryn
to really care about. The “romance” mostly meant that a guy was
there and wanted to date her, but the big romantic tension was that
she felt she couldn't socialize and look for clues to her past at the
same time.
In general, there were no real
conflicts in other areas either to create the tension necessary for a
good story. And what attempts at conflict there were, seemed false
to me so I just couldn't get into caring about the character at all.
Young adults reading this now will also
find the technology very out-dated and I expect they would have trouble relating to a search for family without the use of Google and other
online options. It is getting harder and harder all the time for
even someone my age to relate to that. In a lot of stories, a
passing reference to this type of thing isn't a big deal, but in this
book there is a lot of talk about how she is actually searching for
information by following tips from a book. Many of those tips are
still valid, but the lack of Internet searches is more glaring than
usual. But maybe I wouldn't have noticed so much if I had been
interested in the rest of the story more.
Author: Irene Bennett Brown
Reading
level: Ages 12 and up
Audiobook:
Narrator: Laurie Klein
Publisher: Books in Motion (December
16, 2008)
Duration: 6 hours, 23 minutes
ISBN: 9781605481456
Paperback:
208 pages
Publisher: iUniverse (October 20, 2000)
(original publication 1985)
ISBN-10: 0595145051
ISBN-13: 978-0595145058
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