When I Found You
by Catherine Ryan Hyde
I’ve recently been working my way through Catherine Ryan Hyde’s novels, but had I started with When I Found You, I never would have read a second one. I only finished it because I kept thinking it would get better and have some of Hyde’s classic “everything is meant to be” themes. She usually writes about a chance encounter with a child or a dog (or both) and how the random kindness lasts decades and changes lives. Yes, she’s the woman who wrote Pay It Forward.
The start of this novel has the perfect setup for one of her feel-good books that make you want to go out and improve a stranger’s life with kindness. A man is going duck hunting with his dog and discovers a buried newborn. He rushes the baby to the hospital, saving his life, and offers to adopt the baby. Grandma intervenes, but the man requests she tell the child about his existence and significance whenever she feels is the right time. Since I love the film Grand Canyon, I thought I’d love this book.
Can’t you just imagine all the tearjerker-worthy moments along the course of this abandoned baby’s life? Go ahead and imagine them, because you certainly won’t read about them. It’s as if Hyde asked herself, “How can I make this story meaningless and needlessly depressing?” As we follow the boy through his adolescence, he turns into an incredibly bad seed. It lightly hints that the lack of warmth and love from his grandmother is responsible, but I don’t see it that way. I completely agree with the way she handled telling the boy about his horrible beginning in life; but the boy himself was incensed that she kept the truth from him for so long. What was she supposed to do? Tell a five-year-old that his mother tried to bury him in the woods? That would be child abuse, in my opinion. But according to the angry teenager (and dare I suspect, the author as well), she should have told the complete truth at all times, so then he’d know he could trust her.
As the novel progresses, the boy never redeems himself. He buries himself into a completely lowlife world, makes bad decision after bad decision, lies, steals, commits armed robbery, is mean and rude to those who care about him, and feels his true calling is boxing. How are we supposed to root for him? How are we supposed to see him as anything other than a bad seed who causes nothing but harm? And furthermore, how are we supposed to support the man who rescued him at the start, continuing to roll himself out like a doormat for this ungrateful brat?
I can’t caution you enough from picking up this book. You might like her other books, or Pay It Forward may have inspired you, but don’t read this one. It’s so awful, I wish I could have the story arc surgically removed from my brain.
The start of this novel has the perfect setup for one of her feel-good books that make you want to go out and improve a stranger’s life with kindness. A man is going duck hunting with his dog and discovers a buried newborn. He rushes the baby to the hospital, saving his life, and offers to adopt the baby. Grandma intervenes, but the man requests she tell the child about his existence and significance whenever she feels is the right time. Since I love the film Grand Canyon, I thought I’d love this book.
Can’t you just imagine all the tearjerker-worthy moments along the course of this abandoned baby’s life? Go ahead and imagine them, because you certainly won’t read about them. It’s as if Hyde asked herself, “How can I make this story meaningless and needlessly depressing?” As we follow the boy through his adolescence, he turns into an incredibly bad seed. It lightly hints that the lack of warmth and love from his grandmother is responsible, but I don’t see it that way. I completely agree with the way she handled telling the boy about his horrible beginning in life; but the boy himself was incensed that she kept the truth from him for so long. What was she supposed to do? Tell a five-year-old that his mother tried to bury him in the woods? That would be child abuse, in my opinion. But according to the angry teenager (and dare I suspect, the author as well), she should have told the complete truth at all times, so then he’d know he could trust her.
As the novel progresses, the boy never redeems himself. He buries himself into a completely lowlife world, makes bad decision after bad decision, lies, steals, commits armed robbery, is mean and rude to those who care about him, and feels his true calling is boxing. How are we supposed to root for him? How are we supposed to see him as anything other than a bad seed who causes nothing but harm? And furthermore, how are we supposed to support the man who rescued him at the start, continuing to roll himself out like a doormat for this ungrateful brat?
I can’t caution you enough from picking up this book. You might like her other books, or Pay It Forward may have inspired you, but don’t read this one. It’s so awful, I wish I could have the story arc surgically removed from my brain.