Book Review: Dear Child by Romy Hausmann

Dear Child by Romy Hausmann
Translated from German by Jamie Bulloch
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2020
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

A windowless shack in the woods. A dash to safety. But when a woman finally escapes her captor, the end of the story is only the beginning of her nightmare.

She says her name is Lena. Lena, who disappeared without a trace 14 years prior? She fits the profile. She has the distinctive scar. But her family swears that she isn’t their Lena.

The little girl who escaped the woods with her knows things she isn’t sharing, and Lena’s devastated father is trying to piece together details that don’t quite fit. Lena is desperate to begin again, but something tells her that her tormentor still wants to get back what belongs to him…and that she may not be able to truly escape until the whole truth about what happened in the woods finally emerges.

A woman is hit by a car trying to escape her captor and taken to the hospital. She says her name is Lena, who is a girl who has been missing for 14 years. She even has a scar on her forehead, just like Lena did. But when Lena’s parents come to the hospital, they say that this Lena is not their daughter. A little girl was with Lena when she has hit and went with her in the ambulance to the hospital. She knows what Lena was running from but she won’t say. She says the woman is her mama and that she has a brother who stayed behind in the cabin to “clean up the stains on the floor.” She calmly recounts her life with her family in the cabin – boarded up windows and doors locked up so that no one except Papa can go outside. But still questions remain: If the woman in the hospital is not Lena, then who is she? And where is Lena?

Wow, is all I can say about this book. Okay, I’ll say more. The blurb on the front cover says that it’s Room meets Gone Girl, which I’d say is pretty accurate. But it’s definitely not an imitation of either. There have been so many thrillers with unreliable narrators since Gone Girl that it’s usually easy to spot the twist a mile away. Not so in Dear Child. And Dear Child has twist upon twist upon twist. There’s no way I could have guessed how it all turned out, and yet the ending actually made sense. That’s all you’re going to get out of me because I don’t want to spoil a single surprise. Highly recommended.