Reviews

We Now Return to Regular Life by Martin Wilson

salicat's review

4.0

What if the real-life Adam Walsh had come home? I feel like that possibility may have inspired this story.

Sam Walsh was kidnapped at age eleven and has miraculously returned home three years later. Sam's story is an emotional page-turner; the worst has already happened and this book is about the aftermath.

Will Sam be able to 'return to regular life'?

You would think that he would be welcomed back with open arms. Except-- that's not completely the case. Sam is now fourteen, and his age coupled with his horrifying experiences have understandably turned him into someone completely different from the eleven-year-old boy who vanished three years ago. So how do family and friends welcome back a teenager they no longer recognize as the little boy who was kidnapped?

We have two narrators: Beth and Josh. The former is Sam's sister, and the latter is Sam's old friend. Both were the last people to see him the day he was kidnapped, and both are struggling with guilt and regret over actions they took (or didn't take) on the day he vanished. This obviously affects their interactions with Sam- and this is the crux of the story.

As I mentioned, this is a very emotional book: the storyline can't allow for anything less. I loved reading it, but at one point I felt I was getting drenched in constant 'emotional processing' and little insight. I also could not understand why some characters behaved the way they did: some were cold/rude to Sam for no reason other than 'they were weirded out' by what happened to him. And Beth's reactions were especially harsh at times. I realize that she was struggling with her own issues, but there were times when she practically ran away from her brother when he just wanted to connect with her. This may have worked if there was more psychological insight into her character, but...there wasn't.

Still, I'm very happy I found this book. An amazing read.

ssjonoyoung's review

4.0

I will say this book was unexpected. So unexpected that I don't really know what to make of it. I loved the story, it follows two perspectives each telling the story of Sam Walsh at heart. Sam had been kidnapped three years ago and now he returns home to his regular life and has to adapt. Only his sister Beth and former friend Josh are the two perspectives we have on it and it's fascinating.

The impact that Sam's return has is like an explosion. It destroys everyone at the beginning, everyone is torn apart and is left with no certainty on how they are meant to be. How do you treat someone who has been abused for 3 years but seemingly has a Stockholm Syndrome type attachment to the whole thing? The answer I think we finally get around to is that you have to treat him like normal.
Beth is the one who really struggles with that, like so much it's painful. Her whole arc revolves around how she has to cope with Sam being back. Because unlike everyone else she gave up and that was heartbreaking to read. In her mind he was dead because that made life easier to cope. Then he's back and everything is different. Everyone is treating her differently and it devastates her. All her friends treat her differently and she struggles. And I think it's fair. Her life has been through upheaval after upheaval and she tried to find stability and then it's torn away. But the one thing I think you could never take away is how much she cares for her brother. The ending scene with Donal and her chasing after him and her comforting him was beautiful.
Other memorable moments for Beth is the Thanksgiving scene. She unleashed hell on Hank and he deserved it, absent father's annoy me. It was hastily patched over but not completely which I appreciated. Her resentment didn't just vanish. But it was getting there. Donal and Beth were cute and I was cheering them on the whole time but god they took their sweet time. I suppose a lot happened but she so obviously liked him. The cafeteria scene was cute and the New year's kiss was adorable. Solid perspective 4/5
Josh's perspective is vastly different. I think Josh spends the most time with Sam and it is through Josh we learn the most about Sam's time with Rusty. But Josh has his own problem to deal with mainly he's gay. And it's like hinted from early on. He's not interested in his date for homecoming and him and Sam get very close. I mean Sam does toss him off at one point like shock twist. That was an interesting scene I must say. I'm on board for it except for the end didn't have them ever talk about it. Which I'm realllyyyyyy pissed off about. That's why I'm giving it 4*'s because why have that happen and then nothing.
Aside from that we get the fun like normal teenagery things from Josh, he's studying hard and worrying about his friends, who are knobs, but that's not the point. Nick and his's friendship is kind of meant to the most important in the beginning. And it tries to be. We get a lot of backstory for them and just overall context of their friendship. But Nick's dismissal of Sam is cruel and kind of not shocking. You wouldn't know what to do and he chose the easiest way out of it. Just ignore. But Josh didn't. He decided he was going to be there for Sam and he was there for it all. They watched movies, played tennis and had portrait sessions. Ya know really normal. But in all of this they are talking they are just talking about all that happened under this cloud that Josh should have been the one. It's Josh's secret for so long but when he tells Sam it all falls apart a bit. It gets stilted until the New Years jolly.
Josh is a sweet kid, he genuinely is. He really tries to be there for Sam and stands by him through all of it. Which I appreciated. You can never count out good friends. But the burgeoning relationship between them should have culminated in a kiss. I'm sorry it should. There friendship and transparency is so much more intimate than other relationships in the book it could have been a 5* sooooo easily.
Sam's story though not a perspective we should touch on. It was dark. We find out early on he was sexually abused and attempted to be murdered and god knows what else. And he is damaged. But we don't see the damage. Not immediately. There's hints of the fractured psyche, the staying up really late. The disjointed responses but it isn't until Rusty dies that we see a broken boy. That scene was hard to read. He was ruined, he tore at everything around him and the worst part is that he misses his captor. Because that's all he really knew for 3 years. It's horrible because you know it happens. But with Josh he's piecing his life back together. With Beth he's piecing his life back together.
I enjoyed this book. I really did. I just wish for two things:
1) The Perspective shifts were clearer.
2) They addressed the handjob. Properly.

Weirdest thing I've ever wrote in a review. Ever.

hulttio's review

2.0

‘Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection and meaning.’ Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

We Now Return to Regular Life is an ambitious novel that aims to answer the question of ‘what happens next’ when a missing child returns to their family. I don’t have the statistics at hand, but I suspect this is, unfortunately, only a minority of missing persons cases. So we might assume that a child, found safe and returned to a welcoming home, should feel lucky and happy, right? Wilson’s novel explores the themes of recovering from trauma and trauma’s impact on others in the survivor’s social circle. In this book, we mainly have the perspectives of Beth, the child’s sister, and Josh, his childhood ‘friend’/neighbor. I don’t typically enjoy first-person narratives, let alone in YA, but it worked well for this story in helping the reader feel the characters’ emotions—I rarely get so moved by books this way, but the emotions in the novel were extremely intense. I definitely teared up a few times. Wilson aims at answering one main question: In the face of a traumatic tragedy, how does a community pick up the pieces and begin to heal?

The simple, diary-like narration and simple plot (not much actually happens, in the way of physical action) made this a page-turner for me—I read it in a single sitting. Sam, the returned son, brother, and friend, has to navigate his small hometown that has moved on without him for the past three years. The cast includes: his sister, who took him for dead to begin healing; his mother, who never gave up hope and searched obsessively to the detriment of her own welfare; and his childhood friends, who did their best to forget him (child Sam was… not a terribly great person). The returned Sam is also changed in those three years, and has to deal with the public’s watchful eye and consternation, with everyone wondering: ‘Why didn’t he just escape earlier?’ or ‘He’s a man, that kind of thing doesn’t happen to men.’ You get the idea. I thought Wilson did a decent job at setting this book in his native Tuscaloosa, Alabama; it seems a lot more believable in the small-town/suburban south that Sam could face all sorts of negative reactions like this, and explain some of the hate he gets. I’ve visited Alabama, and I noticed that some of the attitudes there can still be… old-fashioned, to say the least.

Side note: I’m a bit confused by the blurb given for this book. It seems a little inaccurate. Specifically, this paragraph: As Beth and Josh struggle with their own issues, their friends and neighbors slowly turn on Sam, until one night when everything explodes. Beth can’t live in silence. Josh can’t live with his secrets. And Sam can’t continue on until the whole truth of what happened to him is out in the open. I’m still not sure what this is referring to. I suppose there could be a number of events that count, but they’re not as intense as this makes it out to be.

So far, it seems that I’ve enjoyed the book. However, as I was reading it, I kept getting a sense of intense déjà vu. I’m a true crime and missing persons ‘enthusiast’ and I’ve read my fair share of cases over the years; not to mention, the blurb mentions a ‘ripped from-the-headlines’ plot. I knew exactly what case Wilson was recreating here, and I went to look up who it was—none other than Shawn Hornbeck, a missing child who disappeared in 2003 and was found in 2007. Who can begrudge Wilson this? After all, though we don’t have any right to it, as spectators we often find ourselves wondering, ‘What happened to that kid? Is he alright now? What was going through his mind when he was captive? What were the gritty, awful details?’ … ad nauseam. So is it any wonder that Wilson fashioned his own attempt at answering some of these questions?

Perhaps the novel could have benefited from showing more of Sam’s own perspective. This would have been a much more difficult novel to write, but also a much more satisfying one. As it is, we only get external perspectives—which means there are a lot of scenes of just narration about past events. There is plenty of mental introspection, but none of it is Sam’s.

Even without his perspective though, the coincidences mounted up. As I started re-reading Hornbeck’s case, I was struck by how many details were lifted by Wilson for the novel. Everything from the fact of the perpetrator using a white truck to Sam/Shawn having piercings and shaggy hair when he returns, only to have his hair cut and piercings removed for the clean, suburban Oprah interview. Even the name of one of Sam’s friends is the same as Shawn’s—Tony, a boy who lived near him during his captive years and whom he befriended. Some of the dialogue also felt strangely familiar, as if I had heard Shawn speaking that way during interviews. There is ‘ripped from-the-headlines’ and then there is… taking up actual facts to fill in your novel.

If I were Shawn, I’d feel quite queasy that someone had taken this visceral and traumatic thing that happened to me and made a fictional novel out of it, let alone making money from it. It is clear that Wilson was thinking of cases like Hornbeck, and perhaps even Steven Stayner, but he mentions none of these in the acknowledgments or dedication, or anywhere. These ‘coincidences’ unfortunately left a sour taste in my mouth; so though I enjoyed the novel, at least minimally, the facts were too close to the truth for comfort. Fact is indeed stranger than fiction.

Also, fun fact: did you know that Susannah Cahalan (of the Brain on Fire [my review] memoir) actually made one of her first major career moves in writing a breaking story about the Shawn Hornbeck case? She wrote an interesting write-up of the Hornbeck case, all while she was a student at nearby Washington University in St. Louis. She managed to get an exclusive interview with Devlin, the perpetrator, though he was denied media visitors at the time—she simply wrote ‘friend’ in her visitation request. And somehow, Devlin was okay with this, as well as opening up to a stranger about how he felt. He even OK-ed her to come in for a second, exclusive interview. Devlin’s attorneys tried to put a gag order on Cahalan, but it failed. All of this made her a minor media celebrity for a little bit—and all in 2007 at the age of twenty-two, two years before her now-famous battle with the terrible ‘month of madness’ that she recounts in her memoir.

In any case, I highly recommend reading her write-up of the Hornbeck case if you are unfamiliar. I’m not sure if I can wholeheartedly recommend reading this book. Aside from the aforementioned issues, the writing style is a bit clunky, with weird dialogue choices and actions attributed to characters that don’t align with their age or personality. There are strange scenes that left me wondering why Wilson even wrote them, or included them in the book. (Without giving too much away, I will say: the cycle of trauma?) If you are looking for a miraculous, son-returns-home story, you might as well read up on the actual Shawn Hornbeck case. This is a decent fictional account of the aftermath, something we all might like to wonder at, but there are too many common threads to the actual case if you are well-versed in it. There are plenty of memoirs written by real kidnapping victims that detail their trials (e.g., Jaycee Dugard, Natascha Kampusch), and those might be more worthy to read. (Unfortunately it seems like post-abduction adapting is hard for many of them, and they often lead troubled lives or face struggles with addiction or finding a sense of belonging again.) I enjoyed it in a lukewarm sense, in that it was a gripping novel, and might recommend it… but with some reservations and caveats. Caveat lector!

momo1129's review

dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

Before I say anything else about this book, I feel the burning need to point out... A lot of this book was ripped almost directly from the Shawn Hornbeck case. Which, I suppose, isn't necessarily a bad thing, except for the fact that the author makes no acknowledgement of it. From the name of one of 'Sam's' friends, to the kidnapper's job, two boys being taken, the kidnapper having a white pickup truck, even the physical description of Sam is eerily close to that of Shawn Hornbeck. And again... If the author had acknowledged that in any way, I suppose it wouldn't have given me such 'squick' vibes, but as it stands, it just makes the entire thing feel cheap and exploitative, I suppose.

With that out of the way, however... Some parts of the books were pretty good. Beth, the sister, felt like a real person to me, and I liked how she struggled to adapt as the book went on.

The friend, Josh, however, felt very forced. Like his only purpose was to have a crush on Shawn, and nothing more. We get some details about Sam from Josh, but Josh never feels like a character himself, like he exists to info dump about Sam to us, and be the gay friend with a secret crush. That's the entirety of what Josh does in this book.

The writing style isn't bad; I'll give the author credit for that, at least, he knows how to pace a story, and grammatically, it's solid. I would've given it a 3.5/5, even with Josh's lack of character... but again: without mentioning how he pretty much just wrote a fictionalized interpretation of the Shawn Hornbeck case, without acknowledging it, I just got some seriously bad vibes about it.

secretcistory's review against another edition

4.0

It was OK. I feel like the author pushed too hard for a climax

lucasilievskie's review

dark emotional hopeful sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

crtsjffrsn's review against another edition

4.0

Sam Walsh went missing three years ago, presumed kidnapped and gone without a trace. His older sister, Beth, believed he was dead. His best friend, Josh, was wracked with guilt that maybe he could have done something to stop him from being taken. They both worried that they somehow contributed to Sam's disappearance. But when Sam is found alive, their worlds change all over again. While Sam is indeed Sam, his experience and his ordeal have changed him. As Beth and Josh deal with relating to the new Sam, Sam also needs to find a way to adapt to his own new reality. And then there's the age-old question: Do we talk about everything that happened as a means of processing it, or do we keep it all bottled up with the hope that we can just move past it? And the answer may be somewhere in between--a happy medium that is different for all three of them.

Told from the perspectives of Beth and Josh, this is a powerful and poignant story about love, regret, growing up, secrets, trauma, and simply dealing with the realities of life. This is likely to be a challenging read for some, especially considering the truth of what happened to Sam. But the author deals with the subject matter in a real and raw way, while demonstrating a sensitivity to Sam and to the others affected and impacted by the ordeal. There is no quick fix here for anyone. And sometimes we have to open doors when we know we won't like what's on the other side because if we leave the door closed, what's there will simply continue to haunt us. There's a lot for these teenagers to deal with in this story, but there's also a strength that each one of them demonstrates that I can only say is inspiring and instructional.

michelle_pink_polka_dot's review against another edition

4.0

A page-turning look at what a family who survives a tragedy goes through. I was completely invested in Sam and how he was going to pull through. I just wish that I felt more emotions in the characters. They all felt kind of the same to me, and I would liked some diverse personalities.

jhahn's review against another edition

4.0

Good book. They way the characters reacted to the situation seemed accurate. Pleased with the ending.

lazygal's review against another edition

3.0

There was something a little off about the ending here and I can't quite put my finger on it. Josh's side of the story was paler than Beth's, and while I understood his conflicted feelings they just didn't move me as much (and what Sam thought/knew was very unclear). Beth, on the other hand, had reactions that felt very real to me: her confusion about who to be friends with now, could she go back to that moment before Sam returned? That we see this through their eyes, not those of Sam or any adult, was a choice that blurs some of the impact but does so in a way that may feel realer to readers because while few people will be in Sam's position it is plausible that they might know people who have been.