Someone Else's Child
A Novel
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3.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From debut novelist Nancy Woodruff comes this chilling and beautifully wrought story of forgiveness, renewal, and the ever-elusive second chance.
When fifteen-year-old Matt and his family move from Oregon to an affluent Connecticut suburb, the fact that he is home-schooled brands him as more than an outsider -- he is a town oddity. Just when he seems to have made inroads into the closed social circuit, just when he is embraced by a trio of teenage girls and feels his life might be changing for the better, he is responsible for a devastating car crash that leaves two of the girls dead.
Tara isn't in the car with her best friends. Instead, she's by her mother Jennie's bedside as she gives birth to a baby girl. While Jennie and her husband Chris mourn Tara's friends, and try to make sense of their eldest daughter's loss and their own new baby, a pervasive sense of blame begins to rain down on Matt. Jennie knows the community's reaction will surely ruin Matt's life. But when she reaches out to him, hiring him to work for her high school reunion company for the summer, Jennie suddenly finds herself vilified as well. In the face of community and family derision, both imagined and real, physical and emotional, Jennie and Matt soon find themselves in solidarity. As their attachment grows, Jennie realizes that she is bound to Matt by more than just compassion -- that the broken child she sought to save is, somehow, reviving her.
Someone Else's Child is a deeply moving story of guilt and forgiveness, despair and hope, and the intricacies of love and responsibility. In rich and unforgettable prose, Nancy Woodruff masterfully explores the fraying loyalties that can turn our world upside down in the face of tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Woodruff's earnestly felt but timidly executed family drama concerns the consequences of a tragic car crash involving teenagers in a wealthy Connecticut suburb. Matt Fallon, a 15-year-old home-schooled boy whose family has recently moved to the wealthy town of Sheldrake from Oregon, is driving two girls home from a party one night when the car goes out of control. Matt is unharmed, but the girls are killed. The girls' best friend, Tara Breeze, whose incipient crush on Matt began at the swimming pool they all frequented, would also have been in the car if her mother, 34-year-old Jennie, had not been at the hospital giving birth to a new baby daughter. In alternating chapters told from Matt's and Jennie's points of view, Woodruff recounts the shock, grieving and gradual attempts at healing of all the families concerned. A new mother again after so many years, Jennie has to contend with physical weariness and the mood swings of her teenage daughter while also trying to run her business organizing high school reunions. Compassion for Matt, charged with reckless homicide and ostracized by the community, leads Jennie to offer him a summer job working for her; however, their growing love for each other, although the kernel of the novel, remains unnamed until the last pages. Woodruff's bland writing style keeps the novel from rising far above standard "women's fiction," but there is a satisfying integrity in her portrayal of settled, ordinary people visited by disaster and called upon to make far-reaching decisions.
