A bittersweet homecoming holds dark secrets in this heart-wrenching story of loss, love, and survival for readers of Room When sixteen-year-old Amy returns home, she can’t tell her family what’s happened to her. She can’t tell them where she’s been since she and her best friend, her cousin Dee, were kidnapped six years ago—who stole them from their families or what’s become of Dee. She has to … or what’s become of Dee. She has to stay silent because she’s afraid of what might happen next, and she’s desperate to protect her secrets at any cost.
Amy tries to readjust to life at “home,” but nothing she does feels right. She’s a stranger in her own family, and the guilt that she’s the one who returned is insurmountable. Amy soon realizes that keeping secrets won’t change what’s happened, and they may end up hurting those she loves the most. She has to go back in order to move forward, risking everything along the way. Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee is a riveting, affecting story of loss and hope.
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Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee may appear at first glance to be a YA thriller along the lines of my own novel, Shackled. That’s certainly what I thought I was getting into when I picked the book up in preparation for the World Fantasy Convention where I was going to meet the author, Mary G. Thompson. Mary is a brilliant woman who holds about eighteen different degrees including a J.D. and an MFA. While I’m sure some of that education played a role in the crafting of Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee, there are some aspects of storytelling that are harder to learn than others, some things that just sort of have to come naturally. One of those things is Voice, and that’s an aspect of fiction writing I’m constantly trying to hone in my own novels and in the work of the students I have in various writing classes or critique groups.
Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee is about one girl once named Amy, then named Chelsea, and now trying to reclaim her identity as Amy again after escaping from the kidnapper who took her and her beloved cousin Dee. The kidnapper, a disturbing man with a doll fetish, re-named both girls during their six-year-long incarceration with him in the forests of Oregon. How Amy came to escape is not something I can share without spoilers, but it drives the central plot of the book and explains why, after returning to her old life as a teenager, Amy is now plotting to go back to that scary cabin in the woods.
Overall this is an emotional journey through severe trauma, and I think it has great value for those who are sort of bystander-survivors: those family and friends who did not experience the victim’s trauma personally and therefore may have trouble fully understanding what the victim suffered. There’s great value in the story for that reason alone.
But again, one thing Mary has here in abundance is Voice, and for me that’s really the defining line between great contemporary YA and cheap knock-offs who got into the market when it was hot. Not to name any names, but, you’d recognize them. There is not a lot of external, physical action in the story, although what action Mary does write is handled very well. It’s the internal action that gets the lion’s share of the pages, and that’s good. It works. I start and do not finish a ton of books these days, as my friends at my book club can attest, but I came back to Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee again and again to find out what would happen next. Mary does an outstanding job of capturing inner turmoil and symptoms of what is most likely PTSD, though a diagnosis is never actually given. As someone who still struggles with some of those symptoms, I felt that Mary did an excellent and considerate job of handling Amy’s trauma and recovery.
As it pertains to writers, I recommend this book for the same reason I recommended The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey — there is no predicting what is going to happen. Even after one of the biggest reveals in the book, the story’s not over, and there is just no guessing how things will turn out from page one until the very end. Like The Girl With All The Gifts, it is not fast paced, but it is deliberately paced, and our attachment to the characters is such that we have to find out how all this tragedy is going to resolve. So for you writers, I recommend studying how Mary constructs this novel in such a way that readers can only keep reading to find out the resolution. This is well worth looking into.
So, grab a copy of Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee, and then let me know what you thought of it. Did the author keep you guessing? Did you feel for the protagonist? Am I way off base on this one? Let me know on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Bookbub, Goodreads…wherever! And be sure to follow Mary G. Thompson for more of her work as well.