Title: Taken Away
Author: Patty Friedmann
Publisher: Tiny Satchell Press
Paperback: 427 pages
ISBN: 0984531823
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
What does young Summer Elmwood do when her little sister disappears during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and everyone blames her?
When Summer Elmwood’s hot, bedraggled, exhausted family arrives unannounced at the door of her aunt’s elegant Houston house, her mother explains. “We’ve had a disaster. Not the hurricane, a real disaster.”
It is one week after Katrina laid waste to the Elmwoods’ hometown of New Orleans, and like most residents, they were too close to the tragedy to see its scope. Besides, they were coping with a possible tragedy of their own, and only because their city has closed down have they evacuated. Summer’s baby sister disappeared the day the storm hit.
Two-year-old Amalia Elmwood had open-heart surgery three days before the storm, and in the chaos—breaking windows, loss of power, rising water, departure of doctors and nurses—Amalia has disappeared from Intensive Care. The Elmwoods find themselves helpless to find her in an abandoned city.
When her parents start to suspect Summer—who aches for some positive attention—might be the culprit, Summer musters all her resources to track her sister down. With parents who don’t like technology, she must sneak to use computers and cell phones, but with the help of a friend, Haydn Glade, who also is exiled in Texas, she picks up clues that the FBI ignores and eventually figures out what happened. Haydn, whom she “would be in love with if I didn’t love him so much,” seems a much more romantic boy in Texas. Summer has to decide how much.
Book Excerpt:
Hurricane Katrina
I go up to every person who’s not talking to someone else. “My sister’s two. She was in intensive care. We can’t find her.”
Oh, we’re airlifting them out first,” is the answer they all give.
“She was missing before the helicopters came,” I explain.
“We were lining people up before the helicopters came,” they all say.
I ask where the helicopters are going.
“They won’t know until they’re airborne,” is what I hear from everyone. “But close.” Close, I’m told, is like Thibodaux, possibly Baton Rouge, hopefully not Lafayette. That means sixty or eighty but probably not a hundred-twenty miles away.
I think I have facts to give to my parents, but I wonder if the sequence of events really fits. My head is too full of jumbled information, and I don’t quite have a time line. I’ve lost track of the days and the hours. Right this second it’s impossible for me to figure out if I can relax, to think that maybe Amalia went on a helicopter to another hospital.
About Patty Friedmann
Patty Friedmann’s two latest books are a YA novel called Taken Away [TSP 2010] and a literary e-novel titled Too Jewish [booksBnimble 2010]. She also is the author of six darkly comic literary novels set in New Orleans: The Exact Image of Mother [Viking Penguin 1991]; Eleanor Rushing [1998], Odds [2000], Secondhand Smoke [2002], Side Effects [2006], and A Little Bit Ruined [2007] [all hardback and paperback from Counterpoint except paper edition of Secondhand Smoke from Berkley Penguin]; as well as the humor book Too Smart to Be Rich [New Chapter Press 1988]. Her novels have been chosen as Discover Great New Writers, Original Voices, and Book Sense 76 selections, and her humor book was syndicated by the New York Times. She has published reviews, essays, and short stories in Publishers Weekly, Newsweek, Oxford American, Speakeasy, Horn Gallery, Short Story, LA LIT, Brightleaf, New Orleans Review, and The Times-Picayune and in anthologies The Great New American Writers Cookbook, Above Ground, Christmas Stories from Louisiana, My New Orleans, New Orleans Noir, and Life in the Wake. Her stage pieces have been part of Native Tongues. In a special 2009 edition, Oxford American listed Secondhand Smoke with 29 titles that included Gone with the Wind, Deliverance, and A Lesson Before Dying as the greatest Underrated Southern Books. With slight interruptions for education and natural disasters, she always has lived in New Orleans.
You can visit her website at www.pattyfriedmann.com.
