21 January 2011 I'LL BE THERE by Holly Goldberg Sloan, Little Brown, May 2011, 393p., ISBN: 978-0-316-12279-5

"You and I must make a pact..."-- Berry Gordy, Bob West, Hal David, Willie Hutch, "I'll Be There"

"Sam thought about going back to the First Unitarians.  But it wasn't possible."When you spend ten years being invisible, when you no longer know where you were born, and are not even sure when you were born (it had to have been the summer, because there were memories of an ice-cream cake and running outside through a sprinkler), when your father changed your last name, and you can't remember clearly what your mother even looked like, a room with that many strangers was as terrifying as a bed of sharp knives."

Intertwining a gripping survival story with a sweet tale of innocent first love, I'LL BE THERE is one of the best and most memorable books for twelve-years-and-up that will be published in 2011, and is one of my biggest finds at the recent ALA Midwinter meeting in San Diego.

Seventeen year-old Sam and his twelve year-old brother Riddle were kidnapped by their father -- a murderer and a thief -- a decade ago.  Maintaining their anonymity over the  years, their father has regularly moved them from place to place around the country (and sometimes out of it), keeping his truck equipped with a supply of stolen license plates, and packed as to be ready to leave at a moment's notice as he settles briefly in town after town to then live off of his break-ins into cars and houses.  Every day, the two boys are forced to scavenge for their own food and otherwise fend for themselves.  Sam, who has not been in school since the abduction -- when he was in second grade -- has raised the near-mute and sickly Riddle, who suffers from severe and never-treated asthma; who spends his days creating amazingly intricate drawings of the insides of mechanical objects on the pages of a telephone book; and who has never set foot in a school.

"The days of the week meant nothing to him."Except Sunday."

Sam, a self-taught guitar player loves music and seeks out churches on Sundays where he can slip in, mostly unobserved, and listen to music being sung and played.  So it is that he is hiding out alone in the back row of the First Unitarian Church on the Sunday that Emily Bell is compelled by her college music professor father to perform a solo rendition of "I'll Be There" during the service.  In carrying out her performance strategy of singing to the back of the audience, she locks eyes with Sam and then, in the wake of her singularly abysmal performance, it is Sam who finds her out back of the church and holds her long hair out of the way as she regurgitates her breakfast.  Exchanging scarcely a word with Emily, he then disappears.

Emily's subsequent search for the mysterious and striking young man climaxes with a hilarious scene involving an excrutiating double-date set up by her girlfriend, during which she unhappily stares out the restaurant window, suddenly sees Sam and Riddle walking down the street in the dark, and bolts from the restaurant to talk to him.

So the story of Sam and Emily begins.

"For Emily, he was more than she could have imagined.  He wasn't like the other boys she'd done things with.  He didn't try to tell outrageous jokes and/or bore her with stories where he was some kind of hero.  He didn't boast about stealing his parents' vodka and drinking with friends or staying up all night to pull a prank.  He didn't take out a cell phone and check for messages or have all kinds of attitude.

"For Sam, she was like someone from another planet.  Planet Contentment.  She had energy and enthusiasm, and she had to have never seen what he'd seen, because she was so open and trusting."

I'LL BE THERE tells the horror story of the price that must be paid when Sam and Riddle's father-from-hell finds evidence of what Sam has been up to.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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