A Place Called Here

Author : Cecelia Ahern

Cecelia Ahern is the same teenage author who has penned amazingly beautiful and imaginative books like “Where Rainbows End” and “If you could see me now”. But her number one bestselling book so far has been the deeply romantic, “P.S. I Love You”. Yes the same book which is the base for a major Hollywood movie by the same name, starring Hillary Swank and Gerard Butler. Its one of my favorite movies.

The sub-title of this book, ‘A Place Called Here’ read – “Ever wondered where the lost things go..” Ya you’re right, didn’t sound too appealing. Frankly, the first thing that came to my mind on reading this was that perhaps this book would be some kind of childish fiction, a little fairy tale-ish. But I was too bored with reading sad drama or thrillers or murder mysteries or even grown-up comedy so I thought, ‘aah, what the hell… lets give it a try’.

Turned out, I actually had a great time reading it. After quite a long time and quite a lot of books later, here was a book which simulated my creative mind and imagination to a point where I really enjoyed it. Plus, it wasn’t and didn’t feel childish at all. In fact, at some of the places down the story, I found it resembling and slightly similar to the thinking pattern of most of us in our daily lives. So.. ya… it was great reading this one.

The central character of the book is a woman named Sandy Shortt. She is a resident of Limerick, a small town somewhere in Ireland and she is a Garda. Now, most of us might be unfamiliar with the term, so heres what it means. Garda is a branch, or you could say a type, of police officers or guards who are mainly involved with finding missing animals and people.

Ever since Sandy was a little girl, she would find herself feeling restless and deeply anxious if any of her posessions, no matter how un-important they might be, got misplaced or lost. Be it a pen, or a tooth-brush or maybe one sock, she’d turn her house upside down searching for it. This behavior of hers got her parents worried about her to such an extent that they thought maybe she needed psychiatric help. On their repeated insisting, she even started going to a doctor called Gregory who she eventually falls in love with.

Her sessions with Gregory reveal that the incident which kick started this urgent need in Sandy to find missing things happened when she was ten years old and one of her friends Jenny May-Butler went missing. Ever since, Sandy had always wondered how people or things could just disappear from the face of the earth without a clue. To keep things from getting lost she had actually labelled every single item that she posessed. Her parents thought she was crazy, and maybe she was suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but she knew that she wasn’t sick. There had to be an explanation. And she finds all the answers to all of her questions when one fine day, she herself goes missing.

It was just the nightmare she was always running from.. or maybe running into. When she goes missing, she arrives, literally stumbles upon a place, deep inside the forest which is home to all the things and all the people who had gone missing. Yes, there actually existed a place, hidden from the world, not appearing on any maps, about which no one knew, except the people who inhabited it. I know, sounds bizzare.

The people there didn’t know how they came to arrive there, and didn’t know their way back home. They couldn’t find their way back no matter how much they tried. They would just keep coming back here. Thats why, they had christened the place as “Here”. Now, “Here” was like some small village, home to thousands of missing people and things. All people who had united in their distress of losing their way and being separated from their homes and families.

All this was too much to take in for Sandy, who just wasn’t ready to accept that she was stuck her for the rest of her life and would never return. But she eventually had to accept it. And while she was there, she decided to look for all the people she had been finding as a Garda and tell them about their families. In the process, she even finds Jenny May-Butler.. the cause of the beginning.

Towards the end of the book, Sandy stumbles upon the real world just as she had arrived at Here. And when she tries telling everyone about the place and the people, no one would believe her… obviously!!But then, Gregory finds a picture of Sandy and Jenny May-Butler among Sandy’s clothes. To find the picture of a grown up Jenny, a girl who went missing when she was ten and whom no one could find, was something he couldn’t come to terms with. That made him believe that all Sandy had ever said about things going missing was true, and she after all was not mentally disturbed.

I know the story sounds bizarre, but it also was something unusual and different. I found it really intriguing and interesting, and maybe you will too.