The Girl in the Red Coat Paperback – February 7, 2017

Another child abducted. Another frantic, anguished parent awaiting news. Why read it?A. Kate Hamer's writing -- if you care about bewitching metaphors, poetic prose and a deeply evocative atmosphere you will find it in this novel.B. The plot is pure genius. This diabolical tale has no predictable route or exit. Its surface topography is a vast and unfamiliar landscape -- rutted and treacherous, studded with thorns and as twisty as taffy.C. The absolutely mesmerizing voices of the two main characters, Carmel and her mother Beth. The chapters alternate -- each are told in the first person by the mother and the daughter. Hamer embodies these characters so completely you might wonder if she's schizophrenic. She IS eight year old Carmel lost in the fog. Tugging on her crimson toggle coat. Looking up at adult faces the way an 8 year old would. Seeing eyes and mouths and leaves and limbs and loss the way an 8 year old would. Kate Hamer constructs this captivating little girl so deftly and beautifully it's impossible to imagine the child doesn't actually exist in the world. It's impossible to imagine there is a grown woman behind her -- Her choreographer, her Frankenstein, her God: holding her upright, wielding her small arms and spouting her meticulous 8 year old voice with its perfectly whittled down vocabulary and brutally candid prepubescent observations. And then the child is gone and Beth the mother reappears. Her long limbs whipping about restlessly, her exhausted adult eyes combing every inch of land -- sucking up anything and everything that could possibly lead her back to her child. Hamer gives herself completely to each character. She is an incredibly visceral writer. She writes like a fox shadowing its prey. She knows when to move. When to leap. When to bite. And when she does, watch out because she bites to the bone.D. The fantastic freak in the fog. The Girl In The Red Coat is a cunning and menacing tale. It lures you in like a fairy tale at first. An allegorical nightmare --all swirling leaves and smoky woods. The night sky sparking as the girl in red darts through a lush green maze. Her mother tearing after her. After that flash of red. But something else is after little Carmel too. Something deranged and sinister and it's not the predictable pedophile hoping to defile her. Hamer is clearly too smart and innovative for that hackneyed route. Something will emerge from the fog and the fog will take great chunks out of them until they're nowhere....until they're gone.E. The mother and daughter's extraordinary endurance through it all. This novel is an illustrious thriller but it's also a taught and perceptive psychological drama. When she isn't splashing on buckets of terror and suspense Hamer is boring into the psyches of this mother and daughter torn apart like a little child boring into a Baroque cupcake the size of a ostrich egg. By the end Carmel and Beth are strewn everywhere. Their mangled dreams and silver tears. Their rotting memories and long rivulets of desperation. You can almost reach out and scoop up their love. Love as hard and calloused as gravel in your hands.

Beth was still adjusting to life as a single mom, living in their little house in Norfolk, England, and spending time with her eight-year-old daughter Carmel at festivals and parks. Carmel was always wearing a red coat, her favorite color.But Beth worried constantly, as Carmel had a tendency to slip away, on her own, no matter how tightly Beth held her hand. And just as she feared, it happened one foggy day at a crowded event. She was there one second, and then she was gone.From here, the story of  The Girl in the Red Coat  bifurcates, with Carmel’s narrative alternating with Beth’s.We see Beth constantly searching, even after the police have almost given up. There are sightings, but they come to naught.Carmel is on a very different journey, and her voice brings the reader right into the frightening and disturbing world she now inhabits.Sometimes I wondered why Carmel didn’t escape, as there were moments when her captor was less vigilant. But then I recalled the story he told when he took her…and how she had believed him. However, a part of Carmel holds steadfast to the core of who she is, separate from those who now control her world; holding onto her true center could be her saving grace.Back in Beth’s world, after months and even years of darkness, she starts over, becoming a nurse. And she even becomes friends with her ex-husband Paul and his new wife Lucy.What will happen to suddenly bring a resolution to the nightmare? How does a conversation with a strange woman named Alice help sharpen the focus in the search?In some ways, the ending felt very abrupt, but perhaps the author is leaving it up to the reader to fill in the blanks. Definitely a captivating story. 4.5 stars.

Perhaps I am becoming too jaded with the passage of time, as I am always seeking that one particular suspenseful book that will leave me breathless. I thought that upon reading The Girl in the Red Coat I would find that this book would leave me in awe and I would rate it as 5 stars, but this was not to be. Yes, 8 year old Carmel is kidnapped at a festival and her mother, Beth, suffers as most mothers would do at the loss of a child. Unknown to Beth, Carmel is taken by an elderly gentleman who tells Carmel that he is her long-lost grandfather. Grandfather whisks Carmel away to another part of Great Britain, where she meets Dorothy, Granddad's wife, and her two twin girls, Silver and Melody. In the meantime, Beth, a single mother, manages to get through life by uttering such silly prose as pollen falling softly on its bonnet, little snow flurries of grated cheese, useless flotsam to be smashed apart in an overpowering sea of circumstance, etc., all of which is so distracting and only takes up unnecessary space in the story. I think the story started to fall apart, in my reasoning, when it is revealed that Carmel was kidnapped due to the fact that she supposedly has extraordinary powers to heal others by laying her hands on their bodies and Granddad (who in reality is not really Carmel's blood relative) and his family make their money by exploiting her at churches. This storyline really fell flat and at the end of the book I was surprised to find out that Carmel and her extended family somehow had flown to the United States, while all the time I thought that they were scamming people in Great Britain. At least there was no child molestation involved, but to get so interested in the story and find out that Carmel had "special healing powers" was a bit too far-fetched. Carmel's mother had always considered her to be "eccentric," but I think Ms. Hamer could have written this story without Carmel and her super-duper powers to heal, as it just did not seem realistic to me. Time to try again for that book that will leave me in "awe."

Eight year old Carmel goes missing at a reading festival and is abducted by a man who persuades her that he’s her grandfather. He, in fact, belongs to a religious cult. She finds herself on a very strange journey indeed whilst her mother, Beth, is frantically trying the find her, never giving up hope of being reunited with her child.This is a beautifully written story about love, loss and survival. The voices of Carmel and Beth are very realistic. They are such resilient and determined characters, showing much strength in their adversity. I was totally immersed in both Carmel’s and Beth’s journeys, there is an acute sense of Beth’s angst and isolation and Carmel’s bewilderment and her all abiding spirit. There is also a sense of unease throughout. I read this book via the Pigeonhole app and eagerly awaited each stave every day. A riveting and emotional read which I can highly recommend. I look forward to reading the sequel, The Lost Girls, in due course.

I am pleased that I bought this and agree with the other reviews about this book, so won't repeat them. It is well written and hard to put down as you keep wondering what will happen next. Characters are described well and it's an interesting story. However I felt a bit disappointed with the end. Although it had a resolution I feel that an extra chapter to explain how Beth, Paul and Carmel coped afterwards would have been good. I feel like writing one myself and sticking it into the back of the book!

Carmel likes the colour red - she travels to town with her mother Beth and covets a pair of red shoes they cannot afford. Her mum and dad live apart now since the afternoon when his clothes went flying out the with Dow and on to the lawn. He lives with his girlfriend Lucy. Beth is plagued by worries of losing Carmel, especially since the maze where she his for hours. Carmel has these absences where she loses time and doesn't always know where she's been. Beth wonders if she is special? A chance encounter leads to someone seeing potential in her; a hidden power or holy gift. Carmel imagines an old man who looks like a wizard with a little rabbit at his feet. At the storybook festival he claims to be her Grandpa and since she's never met him before she believes him.What follows is a story of how time passes when you're standing still. The narrative splits as Beth counts off the days without her daughter and Carmel is plunged into an itinerant lifestyle as a faith healer. I loved the way the author writes about both character's day to day lives while showing us in little glimpses of magic or telepathy how close mother and daughter are. The clues are there but, as Beth describes it, they are each stood high on separate parts of the earth waving at each other from a distance. Deep down neither of them gives up hope and you will keep reading in the hope of finding that one thread in the tapestry that just might bring them back to each other.

I really enjoyed this book.Carmel is abducted from a children's book festival by a man who pretends to be her long lost grandfather, she is taken from the UK over to the USA is involved in a religious cult and made to believe her mother was killed in an accident at the book festival and her father doesn't want to know her and just wants to be with his girlfriend.I'm looking forward to the sequel which is being released very soon.Thank you to Pigeonhole for the chance to read.

It is every parents' worst nightmare - one minute your child is there, squirming in your grasp, and the next they're gone. Your breath tops. You look. You scan. You panic. And then your eyes light on them and the world stops spinning. You breath again (and tell them off).Beth is not that lucky. When she takes her eight year old daughter, Carmel, on an outing to a local Children's festival, her nightmare becomes a reality: Carmel disappears. The narrative that unfolds from this unsettling moment, is both compelling and heart-wrenching. Told from the twin perspectives of mother and daughter, the reader is able to see how both deal with the separation.Hamer's debut novel, establishes a believable protagonist in newly-single, overly-cautious Beth. Her tireless search for her only child holds echoes of the McCann tragedy, and the scene in the shoe shop is especially heartbreaking. Carmel I found to be more of a puzzle, but it is her story that I was most eager to follow, primarily because I wanted this likeable child to be okay at the end of the book. Is she? Well that would be telling!'The Girl in the Red Coat' is a compelling read and Hamer is one to watch.