Wish Me Home
By: Kay Bratt / Narrated By: Kate Rudd
Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
Charming, sweet, thanks for picking it for me!!!
Oh how good y’all were to Vote in Wish Me Home for my Next Listen. I’d just finished Chasing the Blue Sky and was limping around, all slugged in the gut.
Partway through it, I was a trifle unsure. Cara Butter, our main character, and her twin sister Hana have been shunted around and mistreated by The System. Mom was Unfit, is dead, they’ve been in and out of foster homes, some even worse than the others. The sisters have MAJOR trust issues.
From the opening, Cara is on her own for mysterious reasons, and a truly adorable stray dog has decided that his lot is with her. They continue on the road together, Cara naming the boy Hemi after her literary hero, Ernest Hemingway, and she believes that, once they hit her whimsically decided upon destination of Key West, she’ll release the dog for adoption so that he might find a stable home. And stability is something that Cara, of all people, canNOT provide.
That’s the plan anyway.
But along the way, she meets up with people who start breaking down her walls, start showing her that maybe not everyone is a self-absorbed toad, that maybe there are people out there who have good and loving hearts.
Make no mistake, this is no Catherine Ryan Hyde novel wherein all unHOLY acts of unspeakable wretchedness occur at the beginning, leaving the characters scarred, only to be followed for the entire rest of the novel with people with hearts o’ gold who teach the main characters that Love is Everywhere, blah blah blah (And I do so get into listening to those every now and then, even knowing what I’m in for with that author… so sue me…). This book is different from those because no, not everyone is nice; and yes, there are really, really goooood reasons for putting up walls. Cara runs into violence and she knows fear too. So yay for author Kay Bratt for not going the Everybody Is Good, and All Things are Roses routes.
The story drags every now and again as for the most part, Cara is remembering each and every wretched family she and Hana survived. And as the story progresses, we start coming to see that perhaps Hana, yes unstable, but? Manipulative? Not as good and loving? Domineering? Selfish? Just who is Hana, and what is going on?
So then we get to the best part where Cara, in Key West and in an environment where she herself is finding stability and acceptance, starts coming to terms with the past, starts coming to terms with the very complicated relationship she’s had with Hana. And we come to the big mystery of just how she came to be running from that nameless something.
It’s very well written, and the Happily Ever After makes total sense due to the slow way the story has unfolded. And due to the Truths that are revealed. It all reminds me of how, in a single moment, the unexpected Truth can change not only the future, but it somehow morphs the past into something entirely different at the same time.
Kate Rudd turns in an awfully good performance, tho’ I did feel that sometimes her voice made Cara sound like a much younger woman than she was. Cara’s no longer in her twenties; she’s past thirty, and options are limited. Plus, she’s had a hardcore life, and Rudd sometimes gives off a certain sense of innocence, of naivety that didn’t seem in keeping. But then, Cara’s been emotionally stunted by all her experiences, so maybe that’s why she can indeed come off sounding flustered and awkward.
All in all, a charming and sweet listen. And I truly appreciated how Bratt made young dog Hemi such an integral character who was loyal, stalwart, worried, dear. It wasn’t like he was an afterthought written in to grab the >ahem< animal lovers who might be swayed to give the book a listen… based on the fact that there was an >ahem< animal tied to the plot. Again: So sue me.
Besides which, Y’ALL chose it for me. That I bought it earlier and had it in my Library and looked it up to offer it in as a possibility and was hoping, fingers and toes crossed, that it’d be voted in… all because a dog was in it?
Well…?
… sue me…!
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