Tamara's Child

This is not the sort of book I generally read, primarily because I would not normally even be aware of it. But the circumstances of my finding Tamara's Child (2011) were not exactly normal. I was curious about an old high school friend I'd lost track of, and when I discovered him, first on LinkedIn, and then soon afterwards on his own author's website, I found that he'd written an award-winning novel about a pregnant teenager whose life is in turmoil. Rejected by friends and family, with nowhere else to turn, she runs away to her ne'er do well step brother in Fir Valley, Oregon. She has no way of knowing when she arrives in this strange new place that she is putting herself and her unborn child at risk, only that she has reached the end of her resources and is desperate for help from any source.

This sounds like good fare for the young adult fiction market, and that is probably why it has been so well received in that quarter, but I would argue this novel is much more than that. B.K. Mayo (my old friend, Robert) has written a dramatic thriller that introduces the reader to many moral dilemmas faced not only by sixteen-year-old Tamara, but by several of those with whom she comes in contact. While she is initially wary of the kindly old doctor who offers her advice and assistance with her pregnancy, she could hardly fathom the plot he was hatching with the aid of her step-brother and a local wealthy lumber baron. As the darker aspects of the book's plot come into focus, including two murders, the fates of Tamara and her unborn child become more and more problematic, and the story raises a number of complicated questions regarding motives and family and love and morality.

Mayo is an accomplished writer who has created some very memorable characters and has allowed them to show themselves to the reader without passing his own judgment on their actions. The result is the kind of complication in motives and morality that rings true to life. The young man who gets Tamara with child and then abandons her, before later tracking her down and seeking a reunion, seems hardly worthy of her affections or loyalty, but the rough justice he receives from her step-brother, both uncalled for and even somewhat off-hand, is emblematic of the way Mayo's characters interact. His portrayal of the desperation and chaos that marks the lives of America's social and economic underclass is poignant and sympathetic. Even someone as brutal as Tamara's step-brother comes to life as a man with few resources and little depth of character now confronted with what he must see as his main chance, only to find himself defeated by economic forces far beyond his very limited understanding of the way the world really works.

And yet the novel also shows how Tamara's strength of character, driven primarily by her determination to have and provide for her child, somehow carries her through the darkness of her present circumstances and eventually leads her to the kind of self-knowledge that will allow her to find her way to something better. She stumbles onto faithful friends who are willing to help her and to put themselves at risk for her sake, something she had not encountered since childhood. And Mayo does an excellent job of describing these relationships and the bonds of friendship that grow among those who are willing to give something of themselves to help someone else. Nor are those bonds exhibited only by characters from the lower social and economic strata of the book. And that quality is what lifts this novel to a higher level. It seems that none of the major characters is possessed of unalloyed goodness or evil. They are all guided by a complicated mixture of selfishness and altruism that makes them appear wholly human.

Nowhere is that mixture more richly displayed than in the novel's concluding section, which picks up the story from the perspective of Felicity, Tamara's child now grown and preparing to embark on her own adult life. By a masterful stroke, Mayo shifts from the third person narrative style of the novel's main section, to a first person narrative by Felicity herself, as the story of her own origins unfolds in a series of traumatic revelations that shakes her confidence not only in her father and family, but in herself as well. Her doubts threaten to derail a successful career as a physician before it has a chance to begin, but something within her leads her to seek out her mother and the truth, even when that turns out to be something other than she expected and hoped for, even when it leads her to a kind of understanding she had not anticipated.

As I said, I was surprised to find myself reading this book, but I'm very glad I did. It was a personal pleasure that I can hardly describe to discover what a talented writer a young man I once knew well has grown into. And even more impressive than the writing itself, which is fluid and deft, is the wisdom and insight into the difficult moral dilemmas that confront us. It's assuredly a very good book for young adults, because it points out that life is always complicated, and that we often have to learn to know and trust ourselves as well as others. There are seldom easy answers or well delineated paths to follow, and judgments are difficult even for those who want to do the right things in life. It's a good book and I hope it will be read for a long time, which I suspect it will.