Where We Belong

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

[Leah]

Catherine Ryan Hyde is one of the best storytellers around – and I can tell you that with the surety that comes with having read her last 5 or 6 novels. She tells stories like nobody else can, and makes you feel for characters when you least expect it, so it was my absolute pleasure to have two books to read by her this year – her new American release Take Me With You (which I LOVED) and her new UK release Where We Belong (which was released in USA last year). I devoured Take Me With You a short while ago, and with July looming large, it was time for Where We Belong and I firmly stand by my beliefs that this is an author who every one should read, because she is simply AMAZING.

It literally does not matter what Catherine Ryan Hyde writes about, because I love all of her stories. Because it’s the characters she writes that you really come to care about – Grace in Don’t Let Me Go, Nathan in When I Found You, and so on and so forth. I don’t know one other author who can take a bunch of strangers and make them into people you think of as family, but Catherine does it every. single. time. In her brand new book Where We Belong, we’re introduced to fourteen-year-old Angie, who hasn’t got the best home life – her dad is dead, her sister Sophie is autistic and doesn’t talk, doesn’t comminicate, doesn’t like to be touched, and screams the house down on a regular basis. Angie, Sophie and their mom move from place to place, until it becomes too much for the neighbours and they’ve never found a place to belong. Until the unthinkable happens – they move in with Angie’s Aunt Vi and the neighbour, Paul’s, dog Rigby captivates little Sophie into silence. It’s blissful, until Paul announces he’s retiring and moving to the mountains. Desperate to not lose the peace they have found, Angie’s mom decides the only thing they can do, is follow Paul to the mountains…

I was absolutely captivated with Where We Belong, right from the very first page (and I expected no less, let’s be honest). Angie’s story is sad, it’s so sad to me that this girl who should be experiencing the joys of being a teenager is instead having to move from place to place, and be the parent when her own mother can’t be bothered. There were times when I was literally angry with Angie’s mom, for not being the parent, for their life being so bad they got homeless and had to sleep in a tent in the pouring rain, and Angie got soaked. But, y’know, not everybody’s life is three-bedroom houses and warm blankets, and as much as I wished for better, as much as I wished the entire family didn’t have to struggle, it was what it was, at least for that little period of time. It also kind of made me sad for poor Sophie. She doesn’t communicate, except via the medium of keening, and this wonderful dog is the one thing that captivates her and I thought that was so sweet, how she mirrored Rigby, how Rigby calmed her down, how Sophie helped Rigby by being able to tap into Rigby’s psyche. It was both heart-breaking and awfully self-aware to see it. I could literally hear Sophie’s screams when Rigby was gone and it broke my heart.

I love how Catherine Ryan Hyde goes against the norm and will quite happily send her characters on a wild goose chase – as Angie, Sophie and her mom follow Paul up the mountains. I love how she connects strangers and how her characters are always willing to help each other out, and I loved Angie and Paul’s friendship. It was beautiful that a teenager and an old man could relate the way they did – Angie was most definitely an old soul, in a young body. There was just so much to love about the novel, all those little nuances that can only be in a Catherine Ryan Hyde novel. The fishing trips, the dog walking – the way Sophie would follow Rigby wherever Rigby would go. Never has a silent little girl stole my heart so much; going through dog flaps, curling up next to the dog at all times, showing she’s smart when it comes to escaping their apartment. It let us see Sophie as something other than this annoying little kid who screams a lot. But it was also devastating. Absolutely devastating, because as Paul warned us early on – dogs like Rigby aren’t like normal dogs, they don’t live to be 15 or 16 and are lucky to get to 9 and I should have heeded that warning, and I did, and it still broke my heart.

Where We Belong was pitch-perfect. It had it all – it even made me giggle, in a cute little scene where Sophie, Angie and Rigby are out for a walk and Sophie’s offered some licorice from the bookstore owner and instead of eating it herself (as any kid would do) she gave it to the dog. It was such a warm novel, such a hopeful novel that, perhaps, Angie and her mom could work it out so that Sophie could be calm as much as possible, with or without Rigby, that they fought and fought to not put her in a home of some kind, and I loved how Paul let them into his life, even if it was rather reluctantly. Sometimes those are the best kinds of way to let someone in your life – if it happens so that you don’t even really know it, it means the person really means something. I always feel a total sense of satisfaction when I come to the end of a new Catherine Ryan Hyde novel, she tells the story so well and it just leaves you with a warm, hopeful feeling in your chest that you’re leaving these characters, sure, but they’re in a much better place than you met them and things can only get better. Angie was the perfect narrator and I sincerely hope she got her trip to Tibet in the end….