If You Find Me

Emily Murdoch's debut novel, If You Find Me (2013), is a work of YA fiction that centers on Carey, a teen who lives in the woods with her younger sister, Jenessa, and their mentally ill mother. Their mother’s behavior becomes more and more erratic until she disappears entirely. Two people come to the woods to take the girls back to the world of civilization, where Carey must adjust to a new world of high school while grappling with the fact that her mother abducted them a decade ago. She seeks answers for her mysterious past, struggling to keep her sister close as the secrets of their early childhood come back to haunt them.

Exploring themes of family, abuse, and the ability to survive in impossible circumstances, If You Find Me was critically acclaimed and received some of the best reviews of any young adult novel that year. It was long-listed for the 2014 Carnegie Medal and short-listed for the 2014 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. It was optioned for a major motion picture and reissued in an expanded version in 2014.

If You Find Me begins in a forest in Tennessee, where fifteen-year-old Carey Blackburn lives with her six-year-old sister, Jenessa. Carey is Jenessa’s primary caregiver, as their mother is rarely around and is abusive when she’s there. Carey has to ration their supply of beans to survive. She has flashbacks of her mother’s abuse when her mother is around. Carey’s mother took her to the woods when she was five; she has always told Carey that her father was abusive. Despite all this, Carey has managed to carve out a semi-stable existence for her sister, reading books to her and playing games in the forest. The books come from their mother, who brings them supplies when she comes back from her absences, a rare kindness from her. One day, the girls hear footsteps approaching their cabin after their mother has been gone for weeks, the longest absence ever. It’s not her. It’s a social worker, Mrs. Haskell, accompanied by a man whom she tells them is their father. Carey doesn’t recognize him as her father, only calling him “the man” in her head. Mrs. Haskell tells them that they’re going to live with their father, and although Carey is terrified because of the stories she was told, she knows she has to go with them to protect Jenessa. Jenessa is selectively mute and doesn’t really talk since what is known only as “the white star night.” Carey isn’t willing to let her go into a foster home.

“The man” lives on a farm with a wife who is kind to the new girls, a mean teenage daughter named Delaney whom Carey clashes with, and a three-legged dog that Jenessa forms a bond with. The girls struggle to adapt to their new lives, including getting sick the first time they eat fast food. Everyone has trouble adapting, but the man and his wife continue to support the girls as they adapt. The next challenge for Carey is learning to navigate school as she tries to catch up academically and enters high school. Little things that others take for granted, such as running water, continue to vex her. At the same time, she has frequent flashbacks to the abuse her mother inflicted on her; she increasingly starts to doubt her mother’s narrative of the events. Doctors find evidence of cigarette burns on her and Jenessa’s backs, and Carey remembers that her mother inflicted them. Carey and Delaney’s relationship goes from bad to worse when Carey becomes close to Delaney’s crush, Ryan, at a party. It turns out that Ryan knew Carey when they were both little kids. Their mothers were friends until Carey’s mother’s mental illness got out of control, and she ran off with Carey. Carey and Delaney eventually make peace when Carey keeps an important secret for Delaney, making sure no one finds out Delaney was having sex with her current boyfriend.

One morning, the family dog Shorty has vanished. Jenessa is devastated; this makes her speak to her new parents for the first time. Carey and the man go out to look for Shorty and find him being mauled by a wild animal. They take him to the vet and he recovers. Carey, who has been coming to trust her father more, tells him she wants to tell him why Jenessa is mute. She takes him back to the trailer she and Jenessa lived in all those years, telling him the story of how a man came to the camper one night, demanding to know where their mother was. She owed him money for drugs, and when he found out she wasn’t there, he raped Carey. He was about to rape Jenessa, too, but Carey grabbed a shotgun and shot him. He tried to escape, wounded, swearing to come back to kill them. Carey chased after him and shot him dead. When she returned to the camper, Jenessa wouldn’t speak to anyone but Carey. Carey reveals that this man was Jenessa’s biological father, and asks him to never let Jenessa know. He agrees, assuring Carey that she has nothing to feel guilty for, that she did everything right. She calls him dad for the first time, and they head home.