She Treads Softly: Someone Saw Something

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Someone Saw Something

Someone Saw Something by Rick Mofina
4/30/24; 400 pages
MIRA

Someone Saw Something by Rick Mofina is a highly recommended family drama centered around the search for a child who has gone missing and presumed to be abducted.

News anchor and journalist Corina Corado asks her sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Charlotte, to pick up her six-year-old little brother, Gabriel, from school because their father, Robert had to delay his flight and is unable to do so. Charlotte and Gabriel walk through Central Park on their way home so he can have a text flight of a plane he made. As the plane flies over a hill, Gabriel runs off to get it and Charlotte, who is texting, says she'll be right there waiting for him... but he doesn't come right back. Charlotte runs to find him and can't. The unthinkable has happened. Gabriel is missing.

A missing child and subsequent search and investigation is enough excitement to hold up a plot. Adding one complication, the hate mail Corina receives as a well known journalist is an understandable concern. But Mofina ups the ante to almost unbelievable levels. The number of secrets, twists, and extraneous directions the investigation takes is throwing everything into the plot, including the kitchen sink. The whole twenty-one year old "boyfriend" of your sixteen-year-old daughter thread could have been left out, as could Robert's big secrets.

The characters are portrayed as realistic individuals, except for maybe the whole withholding of major pieces of information that might be connected to the search for their SON. However, while reading your emotions will be running high as you wait for the characters to just tell the whole truth.

Admittedly, it held my attention because of all the secrets and intrigue, but in the end I felt as if the main concern, Gabriel, was being buried under all the other plot threads and characters included in the narrative. This overload of extras that maybe were possibly connected with the investigation actually slowed down the novel and the main concern - searching for Gabriel. 3.5 rounded up. Thanks to MIRA for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.