My Abandonment by Peter Rock: book review

My Abandonment (2009) is set in Portland, Oregon, in the United States in the summer of 1999.

The narrator is 13-year-old Caroline. She lives in a cave with her father in a forest park on the edge of town. They are hiding from people. She doesn’t go to school, but they read a lot of books from the St John’s library when they go to the city once a week.

Then the police find them, and they are placed in a new house in the city, in a place close to her father’s new job and her new school. After four years in the forest park, Caroline will have to get used to this new life, but her father still likes to connect with the forest.

‘These are the worst days. The rules and the way things work in the city are different, sharper and dirtier than in the forest park …’

Her father says the government are keeping track of them. He calls them ‘the followers.’ He has a past that his daughter knows nothing about. Someone calls him Jerry, but she knows that’s not her father’s name. ‘Every problem I have comes from believing something to be true that is not true.’

And years later she says … ‘I am no longer angry with him for the mistake he made.’

This a Young Adults novel, based on true events, from the daughter’s perspective: a father and daughter living off the grid, in a marginalized life. But all is not as it seems. Parts are creepy, parts are obscure and confusing, parts are simple, and parts are boring.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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