In Search Of Us – Ava Dellaira

This is a book I had stumbled on in the library whilst looking for possible books to read. Honestly, the books on my TBR list are so popular, I can literally never find them whenever I go. I have to hold them manually and beforehand, like I don’t understand??? jkjk I do, I do, I’m just in high frustration and hangry mode.

Now, I think that I should start by reviewing this book… or should I just go off into a side tangent about school…? 

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Oh god, where do I even start with this book?? The tiny synopsis maybe?

So, this book revolves around Marilyn, a young white female who has a daughter (our second protagonist) Angie, who’s mixed race and on the ‘quest’ to know more about her father, who died before she was born. Set in two different time frames, this book followed both of their wonderfully written stories, intertwining delicately and beautifully, and really giving me the synesthesia-induced feeling of the smell of roses and the slight metallic scent of blood. For that last point, I have no idea how that got into my mind, but let’s keep it book-related for now…

Angie is biracial or mixed-race, and grew up with her white mother. She had never met her father (who I gave the backstory of as being dead before she was born.) While Angie and Marilyn’s relationship with each other is raw and loving, Marilyn is very secretive, and Angie has always felt a need to know about her past, and who exactly her father and mother were before she came into the world. Angie and her best friend Sam have an on-again off-again relationship with each other, which was one of my favorite parts of the book. Ava Dellaira was really good at writing flawed relationships that feel authentic and realistic in the most interesting way, and that’s something which is extremely hard to accomplish in realistic fiction works like this.

On the other side, Marilyn’s story has her and James (Angie’s father) back when they were Angie’s age, and it’s interesting to watch them slowly inching towards what I know would be the outcome of the relationship, while also not know precisely what their ultimate ends will be. And again, this book was all about mother/daughter relationships, and Marilyn’s relationship with her mother is really what drew the two timelines together for me, along with Marilyn trying so hard to be a good mother to Angie. This book had one of the best narrative voices that I’d read, and it kept me engaged all the way through.

To be frank, I was a bit unsure of the changing perspectives at first. I didn’t like the immediate change we had at the beginning because I didn’t care about Angie enough yet… but at the same time I completely understood why the author did it that way as well, and warmed up to the later chapters of the book. I liked that we got to see Marilyn, the mother, as a teenager while also seeing Angie as a teen. We got to see their similarities, but it also gave us insight into Marilyn as we get to see her as a mother through Angie’s timeline. It really gave us a lot of insight into Marilyn that her daughter didn’t have, and I liked that focus on motherhood and adults in relation to their children. One thing that really interested me was the relationship Marilyn had with her mother in her POV. Marilyn’s mother was constantly trying to get Mari a job in modeling or acting, and it was getting risky, since they were getting in a position where they’d need to be in debt for a while.

However, even though Mari didn’t like doing the auditions, she did them for her mother’s sake and couldn’t stand to see her heart and dreams for her daughter broken. On that note, I’d agree with both sides- first, Marilyn’s trying to make her mother happy by doing things for her, but she shouldn’t give into the pressure and amount of concern her mother’s giving her. As with her mother, I think that it’s good to try new things over and over, but part of what made it risky was the fact that the auditions and meetups were, simply put, not working.

I also really just liked the true character of Marilyn, actually. I related to her longing she felt both as a teenager and as a daughter, and loved that she had the ambition to fulfill her dream in some way by training herself even without the right equipment. I liked the trait that she would frame photos with her fingers and looked for good angles in almost every place that she liked going to- she was honestly doing everything she could to prepare herself for her possible future. I think everyone should have that drive, and it’s something that really builds character development.

From Angie’s perspective, I saw something new I hadn’t really seen in too many YA books at the time. I don’t think parents need to be happy all the time – they should be able to express all the emotions they have. But it was the first time I could see that a child wanted their parent to be happy and would sacrifice for that to happen…

One thing that did really stick out for me in relation to Angie was the fact that, as a mixed race child, was often believed to have been someone else’s daughter, not Marilyn’s, who was white. I literally cannot imagine how difficult that would be for a child, and it made my heart hurt. It just didn’t seem right to make assumptions, did it?

“Love’s worth it, for however long it lasts.”

Ava Dellaira, In Search of Us

The book was really easy to read. It had a natural flow to it and I found myself becoming involved in both women’s lives.This is a story about two women trying to find themselves in different ways, although they both dreamed of going away from their mothers and going to find themselves. I truly loved the way that Angie and Marilyn were given unique personalities and equivocated mindsets. I did feel sorry for Angie discovering the truth about her father rather than hearing it from her mother and found myself wanting to wrap my arms around her as she struggled with her identity as a mixed-race young woman and never knowing her father.

The book is beautifully written and is certainly emotional in places as it does tug at your heart and it’s strings and knots. It slowly shows the world through the eyes of two realistic and likeable characters. In Search of Us by Ava Dellaira is a contemporary fiction, one of them that I would recommend to someone in search of themselves. What you would get it a thoughtful, engaging story if you read it.

Thank you so much for reading, and I hope to see more people reading this story. See you in the next review <33

Peace.