Finding Me, by Kathryn Cushman

[Note: This book was provided free of charge by Bethany House Publishers in exchange for an honest review.]

In this briskly-paced novel that checks in at a little more than 300 pages, the author manages to pull together a few different strands that mix contemporary social concerns, a strong perspective on the essential nature of Jesus Christ to salvation, and longings for happiness and love, in a compelling story with complex characters. The novel’s central questions are important and dark ones: What would you do if you found out what you had been told about your whole life was a lie? What would you be willing to risk to find out the truth? At the core of this novel is a young woman, just out of college and a bit adrift after the death of her father and stepmother in a car accident and the loss of a job due to her ethical conduct in refusing to let an old woman be swindled by her boss, whose search for the real family she never knew leads her across the country from California to a small town in Tennessee. Her arrival there as a fish out of water triggers everyone to wonder about her dark secrets, and leads many of the characters to seek to provide help and assistance to someone who is clearly a suffering soul in a great deal of distress, something that more than one vagabond has seen in the course of a life’s difficult travels.

As someone who can identify at least in part to the anxious and conscientious heroine of this story, in her brokenness and her determination to do the best she can, and to wrestle with the truth about her background, including the sordid tales of her father and stepmother, parts of this novel were painful to read. The heroine is herself dogged by unjust and continual suspicion by some characters because they clearly know something else is going on but don’t trust her motives to be noble ones, and her attempts to rebuild her life lead her into immense difficulties over how much to share and how much to conceal, problems many of us can recognize well. She has a flirtation with the son of her boss, who mistrusts her but also finds himself attracted to her, a conceit that works far better in novels than in life, and comes to be a caregiver and a project for a sister who does not recognize her. Despite being a very nervous young woman who is a bit of a flight risk, she manages to show decency of character and considerable personal growth throughout the course of the story. Wisely, the novel itself does not end in a marriage or a baptism, suggesting that the immense nature of her difficulties requires a longer term solution, even as the book’s plot places her clearly on the path to salvation and matrimony without explicitly having her arrive there.

Strikingly, this story is a blend of two real stories involving disappearances, both of which are hinted at in the novel, examining the wreckage left when people decide that disengagement and disappearing and starting a new life are preferable to dealing with the disastrous decisions we have made. Escape often only more deeply entangles us in our most difficult matters, namely those involving we ourselves. After all, where can you go to escape from yourself? This novel deserves credit for wrestling with serious questions of ethics, for showing a compassionate but also uncompromising stance about adultery, fraud, and honesty, and for doing all of this in a novel that avoids becoming a lecture. One gets the feeling that Kelli is someone one would like to get to know, a young woman a bit down on her luck, with a deep amount of pain and suffering from her background, but a young woman of spunk, of character, and of attractiveness that is both inside and out, as well as a deep sensitivity to the concerns of others. Such people are worth getting to know both in life as well as in literature.