Customer Reviews

Love Is a Missing Person

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3 star:		(1)
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This book Love Is A Missing Person by M.E.Kerr is about a fifteen year old girl named Suzy Slade. She lives with her mother in Seaville, Long Island. Her sister Chicago lives with her dad in New York. When she was two years old her mother and father had divorced. Her sister is feeling unwanted and unloved and wants to move back in with her mom. And she wants to have Suzy move in with her dad. Chicago came down to Seaville and they all lived together for a while. Suzy is always into everyone elses love life and worries about their problems and not hers. She always had to care for others and not herself. I would recommend this book for girls thirteen and up that care for family problems. i would rate this book with three stars.

I've since read that M.E. Kerr was criticized for her unrealistic dialogue and portrayal of the black characters, but I still think this book is wonderful. Its theme is, natch, love, and how it can change you so much that people don't even know you (or, you become a missing person). Suzy watches everybody around her falling in and out of love, and how they change as a result, from Miss Springer, her library supervisor, who has nurtured her love for a man who left town thirty years ago, to her father, falling in love with a woman only a few years older than Suzy herself, to her sister Chicago, who breaks all taboos (this book was published in the seventies) by falling in love with Suzy's co-worker's black boyfriend. Some of them change for the better because of love (Chicago, for example, develops a focus in life and becomes less reactionary just for the sake of attention), some worse (Suzy's father treats his child bride like, well, a child), but everybody becomes a missing person to Suzy. I loved the theme, and I think this book is really an underappreciated work of M.E. Kerr's! Anyone wishing to dicuss M.E. Kerr with me, please feel free to email!