Skip to main content

There's No Place Like Here by Cecelia Ahern



"You see, there's nothing funny about being missing. I also quickly realized there's little difference between being missing and looking for the missing: every day I search. Same as I did when I was working. Only this time I search for a way back to be found.

I have learned one thing worth mentioning. There is one huge difference in my life from before, one vital piece of evidence. For once in my life I want to go home.

What bad timing to realize such a thing. The biggest irony of all."

from page six, There's No Place Like Here

Close your eyes and chant with me, dear readers: "There's no place like here... There's no place like here... There's no place like here... THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HERE!" And poof, magically we're transported here.

There's No Place Like Here by Cecelia Ahern is... there are so many words to describe this book. The story and characters are unique, creative, original and unusual. They are sometimes hilarious and, at other times, they are heartbreaking. Ahern is an Irish writer, who previously wrote the novel P.S. I Love You that inspired the Hilary Swank starring film of the same title. Both novels take place in Ireland.

There's No Place Like Here tells the story of Sandy Shortt, who is neither sandy haired nor short in stature, but those are not the only ironies in her life. Sandy runs a missing persons agency. She is often the last hope for people searching for loved ones who have gone missing. Sandy has agreed to take the case of Donal, whose brother, Jack, has been obsessively searching for him ever since Donal went missing almost a year ago--the police have run down every lead and their investigation has gone cold. Sandy is Jack's last hope of finding Donal. One day as she's jogging, Sandy runs down an unfamiliar path and ends up in a place called Here. Here is a strange, mysterious, and magical place where all the missing people and things go when they disappear. You know how you swear you put two socks in that washing machine and only one comes out again? That other sock is in the place called Here. Once people or things find their way to Here, that is where they stay. People often don't know how or why they end up Here, and there is no way back to the world from which they disappeared.

There are two mysteries intertwined in this novel. The first is the mystery of Jack's brother's fate and whether or not Jack and his family will find closure regarding this tragedy. The second mystery concerns the nature of Here and whether or not Sandy will find her way back to her family and friends. Ultimately, whether or not Sandy finds a way to return to her family, she is changed forever by her experience Here.

This book is available upon request from Lebanon Community Library, Annville Free Library and Myerstown Community Library. I highly recommend you check this book out because you will not regret it.


--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip.  I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage.  The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it.  It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger.  Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read.  Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one.   Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment.  The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story.  It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve.  Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week.  This  particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst