Don’t get me wrong, this is a well-written, sensitively told story, but it felt like I had been brought to it under false pretences. The synopsis suggested a missing persons case that is re-ignited following evidence related to a man with dementia but this plot element does not come into play until halfway. Instead, this is the story of Emily who flies to the other side of the world to care for her father and ends up re-evaluating her childhood view of him.
I struggled with the first half which mostly about Emily looking after her father as I felt like I was waiting for the plot to kick in. There also seemed to be a lot of subplots (like Ira’s worries about Huntingdon’s or Emily’s difficult relationship with her siblings) that seemed superfluous. The pacing picked up in the second half and suddenly all these little random plots began to tie together. The ending was a tad romanticised but I was prepared to overlook this as I loved the descriptions of the New Zealand forests.
I struggled with the first half which mostly about Emily looking after her father as I felt like I was waiting for the plot to kick in. There also seemed to be a lot of subplots (like Ira’s worries about Huntingdon’s or Emily’s difficult relationship with her siblings) that seemed superfluous. The pacing picked up in the second half and suddenly all these little random plots began to tie together. The ending was a tad romanticised but I was prepared to overlook this as I loved the descriptions of the New Zealand forests.