The Nowhere Child by Christian White @StMartinsPress @MacmillanAudio #bookreview #audiobook

Happy Saturday bibliophiles!

Thrilled to share with you today my audiobook review for this intriguing thriller! This book was full of twists and turns, secrets and lies, and snakes!🐍

• The Nowhere Child

• A Novel
• By: Christian White
• Narrated by: Katherine Littrell
• Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
• Unabridged Audiobook
• Release date: 01-22-19
• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
•  

My Thoughts

A compelling thriller full of twists and turns, secrets and lies, and snakes!🐍 what would you do if you found out you weren’t who you thought you were your entire life? How would you react if you found out you weren’t Kim Australian photography teacher, but Sammy Kentuckian kidnap victim? This book starts with a BANG and maintains it’s intensity until the very end… A brilliantly crafted perfectly paced debut… BRAVO Christian White!

Kim is leading a relatively uneventful life in Australia…. she has a job she enjoys, a sister who loves her, and she is beginning to get it together after losing her mother to cancer…. then one day a strange American shows up with a picture… a picture of a two-year-old girl who he insists is her…. a two-year-old Sammy Who was kidnapped over 20 years ago from a small town in Kentucky, a two-year-old Sammy who happens to be the sister of the strange American Stew…. after a DNA test and confronting her stepfather, Kim decides to head to America to meet her birth family and to figure out how in the world she ended up in Australia? Kim was expecting some culture shock, but she could not begin to imagine how much culture shock she would be in for….

The book seamlessly weaves the past and present storylines together… it was truly fascinating watching Kim navigate her way through small town Kentucky, meeting her birth family, including her mother who is a snake handler in the Pentecostal church…. The past story was equally intriguing… learning about the family at the time of Sammy‘s disappearance, and trying to figure out the how and the who of it all…. as the layers of both past and present were peeled away the creepier and more intricate the deception got…. and the snakes, oh boy those creepy slithery slimy snakes! Yikes! There are parts of this book that still give me the heebie-jeebies!

An intense story that will satisfy your psychological thriller craving! A trope you may have read before, but with a shiny new unique brilliant twist! This is a thriller not to be missed! Absolutely recommend!

🎧🎧🎧 The narrator of this audiobook was Katherine Littrell and I have only two words for you… AUSTRALIAN ACCENT! She did a really good job, even her American male accents were well done… and I appreciated the fact that she did not even attempt to do a southern accent, sometimes that accent can be a bit over exaggerated… as always the audio narration breathed even more life into this already highly entertaining story, a definite must listen!

🎵🎵🎵 song running through my head… Australia makes me think of this song and having that Australian accent in my ear throughout this book really made me think of this song!

”Traveling in a fried-out combie

On a hippie trail, head full of zombie

I met a strange lady, she made me nervous

She took me in and gave me breakfast

And she said

Do you come from a land down under?

Where women glow and men plunder?

Can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder?

You better run, you better take cover

Buying bread from a man in Brussels

He was six-foot-four and full of muscles

I said, “do you speak-a my language?”

He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich

And he said

I come from a land down under

Where beer does flow and men chunder

Can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder?

You better run, you better take cover, yeah”

– Men at Work 1981

*** The other song I was contemplating was “Union of the Snake” by Duran Duran, I’m such an 80s girl!

*** A huge thank you to Macmillan Audio/Minotaur Books for my copies of this book ***

About the Book

Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, The Nowhere Child is screenwriter Christian White’s internationally bestselling debut thriller of psychological suspense about a woman uncovering devastating secrets about her family—and her very identity…

Kimberly Leamy is a photography teacher in Melbourne, Australia. Twenty-six years earlier, Sammy Went, a two-year old girl vanished from her home in Manson, Kentucky. An American accountant who contacts Kim is convinced she was that child, kidnapped just after her birthday. She cannot believe the woman who raised her, a loving social worker who died of cancer four years ago, crossed international lines to steal a toddler.

On April 3rd, 1990, Jack and Molly Went’s daughter Sammy disappeared from the inside their Kentucky home. Already estranged since the girl’s birth, the couple drifted further apart as time passed. Jack did his best to raise and protect his other daughter and son while Molly found solace in her faith. The Church of the Light Within, a

 Pentecostal fundamentalist group who handle poisonous snakes as part of their worship, provided that faith. Without Sammy, the Wents eventually fell apart.

Now, with proof that she and Sammy are in fact the same person, Kim travels to America to reunite with a family she never knew she had. And to solve the mystery of her abduction—a mystery that will take her deep into the dark heart of religious fanaticism where she must fight for her life against those determined to save her soul…

Hope you have a wonderful weekend! Berit☀️✨