Book Review: The Boy in the Photo

Synopsis:

Megan waits at the school gates for her six-year-old son, Daniel. As the playground empties, panic bubbles inside her. Daniel is nowhere to be found. Her son is missing.

Six years later . . .

Megan has endured years of sleepless nights, endless days of missing her son after a futile search. Then she finally gets the call she never stopped dreaming would come: Daniel walked into a police station in a remote town just a few miles away.

Naturally, Megan is overjoyed that her son is coming home! She kept Daniel’s room exactly as he left it, with his Cookie Monster poster on the wall and a stack of Legos under the bed, in anticipation of the day he would finally be back where he belongs.

But when Daniel returns, he is different . . .

According to the police, Daniel was kidnapped by his father. His dad died in a fire, making it possible for Daniel to escape. Desperate to uncover the truth, Megan tries to talk to her son — but he barely answers her questions. Determined to help him heal, Megan tries everything — his favorite chocolate milkshake, a reunion with his best friend, a present for every birthday missed. Still, Daniel is distant, withdrawn, downright hostile.

As she struggles to reestablish her close relationship with her son, Megan suspects there is more to the story. Soon, she fears Daniel is hiding secrets that could destroy their family . . .

Review:

Author Nicole Trope initially set out to study law. But when she submitted her first legal writing assignment, the professor was not impressed, telling her, “It’s not meant to be a story.” She instead earned a master’s degree in Children’s Literature. After marrying and starting a family, she opted to write, renovate houses, and launch a business with her husband. Today, she is an Amazon top 100 author of ten novels and mother of three residing in Sydney, Australia, who writes “about families in crisis, about lives changing in the blink of an eye and about people who somehow manage to survive very difficult situations.”

Trope’s latest book, The Boy in the Photo is a tautly constructed family drama at the center of which is Daniel, who is finally reunited with his mother, Megan, six years after being kidnapped by his father. She says the inspiration for the story came from imagining that having a child “taken from you is one of the very worst fears a mother has, and we are always so vigilant about strangers in our children’s lives. I can only imagine how much worse it would be to have your child stolen by someone who you were once in love with, and how difficult that must be for the child who is taken.” She sought to “write about this with the authenticity it deserves.” She succeeded.

It was indeed a parent’s worst nightmare. Megan finally extricated herself from her abusive marriage to Greg, an emotional and sometimes physical bully. But because they shared a son, Daniel, she could not completely avoid contact with him. Even after the custody and visitation arrangements were in place, and the financial issues resolved, Greg continued emailing and texting Megan, attempting to convince her to reconcile. He blamed her for destroying their family, telling her, “You’ll know this pain one day.” Megan wanted to believe Greg’s words were nothing more than an idle threat, but she couldn’t help but wonder if he was so angry and unhinged that he might attempt to hurt her or, worse, Daniel.

And then it happened. Greg did something he had never, ever done before: he picked Daniel up from school. Without Megan’s knowledge or consent. Megan soon discovered that Greg’s cell and landline telephone numbers were disconnected, and he quit his job a month earlier. Greg’s parents insisted they had not seen Greg and did not know his whereabouts. Megan’s anguished publicized pleas for her son’s return went unheeded, and his abduction became a cold case, although the detective assigned to it, Michael, insisted he would never stop looking for Daniel.

As the years passed, Megan refused to entertain the idea that her son could be dead. She drew strength from the fact that Greg loved Daniel, believing Greg was being raised and cared for by his father, and would return to her as an adult. After Daniel had been gone for five years, Megan found herself guilt-ridden when she realized she had emotionally arrived at a place of acceptance. She spent years imagining various scenarios in which Daniel was found and came home to her. What she didn’t envision was a “scenario in which, after years of hoping, praying and then grieving, she found a place to put him in her mind so that she could move forward with her life.” But eventually, she agreed to have coffee with Michael, who reached out every year on the anniversary of Daniel’s disappearance to make sure Megan knew he had not forgotten and would never give up the search. With no alternative but to go on living, Megan agreed to marry Michael and they became parents to six-month-old Evie.

When Daniel suddenly walks into a police station, announcing his identity and reporting that his father died when the ramshackle cabin in the woods where they had been living burned down, Megan is flooded with joy and relief . . . and questions about what Daniel has experienced during the six years he was missing. She hopes their strong emotional bond will still exist when they are reunited, and is anxious about Daniel’s transition into the new family Megan and Michael have formed in his absence. “Who is he now? And will he still love the person she is today, the way he did when he was six years old? . . . How will she navigate the minefield that is his return?”

Trope effectively relates the story through alternating chapters set in different time periods. The book opens in the present day as Megan learns that Daniel’s whereabouts have been revealed. Trope then takes readers back six years to the day Daniel was abducted by Greg, providing the perspectives of both Megan and Daniel. Interspersed chapters are set on the anniversaries of Daniel’s disappearance, advancing the story by one-year increments and providing insight into Daniel’s experiences as he and Greg moved from place to place, and Greg systematically engaged in parental alienation — the process of breaking down a child’s relationship with the other parent. Greg told Daniel horrible lies about Megan designed to make Daniel believe she neither loved nor wanted to care for him. “She’s tired of taking care of you. She says you make too much mess and she needs a break.” Greg also forbid Daniel to cry or show any sign of weakness, telling his son that his grandparents did not want him, either. “No one in that family does. I’m the only one who truly loves you, Daniel, the only one.” Likewise, Trope reveals Megan’s tumultuous emotional journey as she endured years without her son. The characters’ backstories provide context and heighten reader empathy when, in successive chapters, Trope thrusts them back into the drama playing out in the present.

Megan leans, understandably, on Michael, who is able to remain somewhat detached because of his profession and experience, as well as the fact that he never knew Daniel. She also seeks guidance from the therapist retained to treat Daniel, who advises her not to push but, rather, to permit Daniel to relate his experiences in his own time and way. However, Megan remains suspicious, even though DNA testing conclusively confirms Daniel’s identity. His behavior is disturbing, alarming, and frightening. The sweet little boy Megan raised is gone and in his place a nearly thirteen-year-old adolescent exhibits anger, hostility, and resentment. Gradually, he reveals the lies Greg told him about Megan, but seems unconvinced when Megan offers the truth. Daniel clings obsessively to an old cell phone he says lacks a SIM card on which photographs of his father and the places to which they traveled while Greg was evading the authorities are stored. The phone begins “to bother Megan. Although she knows there is no reason it should, it’s almost disturbing in its innocuousness. He had held it in his hand all the way home from the police station, stroking it, like a pet.” Megan hears Daniel talking when he is alone in his room, despairingly whispering, “This is not my bed and this is not my house and this is not my family. Not my bed and not my house and not my family.” When she asks him who he was speaking to, Megan’s heart breaks when Daniel tells her he was talking to his father and she contemplates the enormous loss he has suffered. She assures him, “That’s okay, you can talk to him . . . to a picture of him. I’m sure you can still feel him with you even though he’s not here anymore.”

But as they await confirmation that the fire victim discovered in the ruins of the burned-out cabin was, in fact, Greg, Megan grows increasingly concerned that her son has been so effectively brainwashed, his view of the world inalterably skewed by the years with his father, that he may never become a functioning member of the family and their relationship may be irreparable. Daniel hurls hurtful, hate-filled accusations at Megan, insisting that she told Greg to pick him up from school and take him away because she no longer wanted to be saddled with him. Indeed, Megan comes to wonder what horrible acts Daniel might have become capable of committing, and ponders whether it is safe to trust him with Evie. “There is a niggling, stray idea that who Daniel was is not who he is now She has no idea who he is now and therefore no idea of what he’s really capable of.” But she talks herself out of her suspicions, telling herself, “I’m not going to think like that about my son, not my beautiful boy.”

Trope keeps the action moving at an unrelenting pace as readers’ suspicions grow along with Megan’s. Because she painstakingly and compellingly reveals what happened to Megan and Daniel during the years they were apart, they are each endearing characters. With Daniel, in particular, Trope has crafted a complex, believable, and heartbreakingly sympathetic young man. He is an innocent victim caught up in a heinous scheme rooted in a need for control and retribution by his father. Trope credibly examines the extent of the psychological damage he sustained. Daniel’s bewilderment and confusion is palpable as he struggles to reconcile the mother with whom he is reunited with the one he remembers and, in contrast, the lies he heard from his father for six long years.

And every parent will understand Megan’s anguish, first about finding herself married to a man who tried to control her and then, when that failed, focused his demented quest for revenge on his young son. Megan’s evolution from utter despair to effectively managing her grief and finding happiness in her new marriage and second chance at mothering is equally believable and compassionately portrayed.

The Boy in the Photo is also another cautionary tale about the dangers lurking in cyberspace. Trope includes a harrowing subplot about Megan’s online interactions with other parents whose children were abducted by their former partners that nearly results in devastating consequences.

With its intriguing characters, contemporary topics, and plenty of suspense and surprising plot twists, The Boy in the Photo is engrossing and, ultimately, affirming.