The Father She Went to Find

March 1, 2024
When Penny Bly was seven, her mother pushed her down the stairs. Emerging from a fall-induced coma, Penny now sees numbers as colors and remembers everything she's heard, seen, or read. Her greatest sorrow is her dad's desertion after her fall, except for a yearly birthday card. On her twenty-first birthday, when the card says it will be the last, Penny decides to find her father, her only hint a "treasure map" the two created during a cross-country trip when Penny was six. But Penny isn't prepared for the real world, and as soon as she sets off, things start going terribly wrong. Witness to a brutal murder, Penny flees, then is molested, with shocking results. She meets Travis, a loner, and Fia, a woman being pursued by two Nicaraguan gangsters, who then set their sights on Penny. It would be easy to lose heart in this terrifying, violent world, but Penny's determination, intelligence, and ingenuity help her survive and find answers--even if they're not the ones she expected. It's hard not to root for this unusual heroine in Wilson's wonderfully original, offbeat story.

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Starred review from February 1, 2024
A savant who's spent most of her life under study in an institution leaves on the spur of the moment to go in search of her father, and all hell breaks loose. Penny Bly has an IQ of 198. She has hyperthymesia, an eidetic memory, the ability to produce fast and startlingly accurate drawings, and an involuntary association of numbers with colors. Unfortunately, all these gifts stemmed from the day her alcoholic mother, Linda, threw her down a staircase when she was 7, leading to the swift departure of her father, Jack, while Penny was still in a coma and her mother's loss of custody. Every year Jack Bly sends a birthday card to his daughter at Eau Claire's Willow Brook Institute for the Brain, but when his greeting on her 21st birthday announces that this will be his last attempt to contact her, she bolts with no warning to her longtime therapist, precious few clues as to her father's whereabouts, and none of the skills that would allow her to negotiate the world outside. Within days, she's attracted the attention of 19-year-old Travis Shepard, witnessed two murders, killed a third victim herself, and added a new item to her to-do list: warning Fia, the Nicaraguan immigrant who runs the Out to Lunch diner in Willmar, Minnesota, that the murderers she saw are coming after Fia too. Wilson punches up Penny's anything-can-happen adventures with a deadpan first-person narrative that pares its cast of characters to the absolute minimum and relies on sentences and paragraphs and chapters as short, and about as reassuring, as hiccups. Fasten your seat belt. This is one wild ride.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.