DEAR CHILD. by Romy Hausmann

 Finished Th 9/28/23

An eBook from the library & I had watched the Netflix German series and this is why I got the book. I also ordered another book by Romy Hausmann called 'SLEEPLESS'.

This is a story about a woman who was held captive in an underground bunker for many years. The twist is that the bad guy grabbed a woman fifteen years ago and had a child with her. This woman died and he was kidnapping several woman to take her place as 'mom' to two kids. 

I liked the German TV show better than the book, but both were exceptional. 

The identity of the bad guy is not really developed and the real story is about the impact on the woman and the kids. 

A twelve year old girl and her brother who is about eight. Both of the kids are very small for their age because of a lack of vitamin D (no sunlight). They also must wear dark glasses all the time because they cannot take direct light of the sun. 

From the book's page at Kirkus:

"A father’s quest for his kidnapped daughter, gone 13 years, may finally have borne fruit.

Hausmann’s debut, translated from the German, revolves around a young woman who has been held captive in a windowless forest cabin on the border between Bavaria and the Czech Republic. As the story opens, she has escaped, one of her two children in tow, only to be hit by a car on the road just outside the woods. She’s in intensive care, unable to explain much of anything; her daughter, Hannah, though extremely intelligent, has developmental issues that make her unhelpful to investigators as well. Once it’s determined that the injured woman’s name is Lena, the police are able to connect her with a 13-year-old cold case involving the disappearance of a college student in Munich. The round-robin narration switches among Lena, Hannah, and Lena’s father, Matthias Beck. Matthias has been counting and cursing the days—4,825 of them—since his daughter went missing. Now, at last, he gets the call he’s been waiting for, and he and his wife accompany the police investigator, a close family friend, to the hospital—only to find out the woman in the bed is not their Lena. But wait—there’s a little girl in the hallway who is their daughter’s spitting image. Hausmann’s novel has been billed as Room meets Gone Girl for its combination of mother and kids locked up in a hidey-hole with dueling, often dissimulating, unreliable narrators. But both of those blockbuster antecedents are strongly character-driven. Here, possibly in the interest of withholding information, the author has failed to make the central characters seem like real people, and the supporting ones are barely outlined. For this reason, the reveals in the latter part of the book are less exciting than they should be.

The plot is sufficiently creepy and twisty, but without well-developed characters, the reader's buy-in will be limited."