Nancy Thorne weaves a brilliant story that encompasses all of the outrageous and contradictory emotions of two young women in her YA novel, The Somewhere I See You Again.
Set in eastern Canada, Thorne takes us back to the early 1970s when the Vietnam War was headlining the news. Hannah has her own war, though, and she has given it a name, Luke. It stands for leukemia, which has changed her life and colors her world as her mom battles cancer.
Hannah lives on Sloan Hill, the wrong side of town, where her family struggles to survive. Her mother’s battle with Luke leaves her weak and bedridden. Hannah must find a job to help out and pick up some of the lost income. To make matters worse, Hannah’s high school is being torn down, which means she and her best friend Stacy will attend Carver High and hobnob with the Burgess aristocracy. Hannah rides on Stacy’s social coattails as her friend’s quiet beauty opens doors and gains them entrance into the homes of the wealthy.
One of the many goals on Hannah’s list is to get inside her dream house, a mansion where her father works as the groundskeeper. Hannah learns that Christopher Holding lives in her dream house and thus begins her mission to set Stacy up with Chris and get invited to his big party. Once inside, she takes photos to share with her father but unwittingly captures images of Chris dealing drugs. Oops.
Stacy has her own set of problems.
It’s only been a year since her father’s death, but her mother decides to become involved with a real creep – Mr. Callaghan, whose interests seem to expand beyond the attentions of Stacy’s mother and onto Stacy. When Mr. Callaghan becomes her mom’s fiancé, Hannah and Stacy know she’s marrying him for the security he brings, not for love. Stacy goes along with Hannah’s plan and becomes Chris’s girlfriend, even though she’s in love with Danny, a short-order cook who dreams of being a chef. She keeps Danny a secret because she knows Hannah would never approve.
When Stacy needs money to help her mom, Hannah devises a plan to blackmail Chris for his drug money with the photos she took at his party. Because his dad is on the fast track to being a judge, pictures of his son dealing drugs would destroy his chances. The photos, it turns out, become leverage. The day the two girls decide to approach Chris, he is already gone. His father accepted a job across the continent in Vancouver, BC.
Nancy Thorne delivers her characters in high-resolution.
Thorne develops a real schemer in Hannah, who goes into overdrive. Mr. Callaghan finds them both jobs in a swank hotel in Jasper and even gives them train fare. Instead, they hitchhike across Canada straight to Vancouver. Along the way, they meet a young American trying to avoid the draft. Things go from crazy to insane as Hannah and Stacy maneuver the travails of hitching cross-country to blackmail Chris. They survive a bear attack, forest fires, and scorching disappointments that will keep readers on the edge of their seats, all to the backdrop of music from the time. Hannah learns who her real friends are, and she comes to understand something more about the complicated world in which she lives.
Nancy Thorne’s The Somewhere I See You Again will have readers laughing and crying and rooting for Hannah and Stacy as they brave the open roads of Canada during the Vietnam crisis era, searching for salvation and a better life. What they find, however, is so much more fulfilling. Highly recommended.
