Where is the Baby?

June 11, 2012
Vale-Allen (Night Magic) delivers an upbeat if clichéd tale of a woman who manages to overcome a horrific early childhood. In 1970, a five-year-old girl, who only knows her name as Humaby, escapes from a locked van and the clutches of two sickos, Wolf and Toadman, and alerts the authorities that a kidnapped baby was also among their victims. That child is quickly recovered and restored to its parents, while Humaby begins to attempt to integrate herself into a world with kindness, toys, and bathing. Her plight tugs at the heart strings of several who encounter her, and she’s eventually placed as a foster child with a Connecticut couple who are both doctors and rename her Faith. Readers should be prepared for minimal mystery and some stilted prose (“Swimming in the now-shallow depths of her interior like a tiny fish was her death wish”).

September 1, 2012
Does the dark past of three characters justify their present actions? When Officer Brian Kirlane meets lost child Humaby--an unfortunate contraction of "hump baby" coined by her abductors--he's immediately charmed by the fact that she's worked to rescue a baby abducted by the same kidnappers. Crime photographer Connie Miller, brought in to record the evidence, feels the same way. So when Humaby's parents can't be located, both Brian and Connie put in with the Department of Children and Families as potential foster families. Unfortunately, the caseworker assigned to Humaby decides the best interests of the girl demand that she live with newly minted child psychiatrist Stefan Lazarus, who's overwhelmed by his own experience. Years later, Humaby has become Faith, searching for the baby she helped rescue when she was a child, her own place in the world and escape from the Lazarus family. Around the same time, Natalie "Tally," freed from prison, drives east to nowhere in particular, hoping for a new beginning. In Connecticut, she strikes up a friendship with local Hayward "Hay" Baines, and the two feel an immediate connection that transcends the short time they've known each other. When Faith realizes that her story intersects with Hay's and Tally's, the three allow their shared past to dictate actions that may jeopardize their futures. Inspired by real events, Vale-Allen (Parting Gifts, 2001, etc.) invents a compelling back story for her characters that makes for a real page turner.

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August 1, 2012
Vale-Allen's well-crafted tale, in which life is a jokester, entwines the related stories of a horrifically abused child; Tally, a directionless former prisoner building a new life for herself; and Vietnam War vet Hay, a former addict living in a shack and reading by oil-lamp light. Reappearing characters, such as the police officer protecting the child-victim in the opening section, help link the separate, decades-spanning, interrelated action dealing with broken children. So that Humaby (for Hump-Baby, as her captors call her), the raped, filthy child who cannot comprehend what a teddy bear is for and whose nights are galleries of horrors, becomes Faith, a despairing teen and, eventually, a doctor. Tally carves a new, postincarceration direction for herself that intersects with Hay, who's squatting on her land. Vale-Allen deftly manipulates and connects the main characters' quests for healing and identity, but readers should be warned of some gut-wrenching, sickening depictions of infant and child abuse.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)