Kristin Hannah's novel
Magic Hour ©2006 is the story of a young girl who appears out of the deep dark woods of the Olympic National Forest in a small community in Washington state. She is speechless and alone save for a wolf pup she clutches as she crouches terrified in the branches of a tree next to the town square.
A highly acclaimed, but publicly disgraced, child psychiatrist and her sister, the police chief of the small town, work diligently to help this child they name Alice. While Dr. Julie Cates seeks to help the child with her physical and emotional needs, Chief Ellie Cates reaches out within the media and investigative law networks to locate the parents of the abandoned-lost-abducted girl. Alice's background is unknown, making is difficult for Julie to know how best to help her; Alice's lack of speech severely hampers Ellie's efforts to find her family, giving her no clues where to start.
I admire and enjoy the books of author Kristin Hannah. She does an excellent job with her character portrayal and development and
Magic Hour is no exception. I have read
Of those I think
On Mystic Lake,
Firefly Lane, and
Nightingale were my favorites. Why? Because I like those characters best. The characters are what I remember most from her books even as the plot details fade in my memory.
On Mystic Lake and
Firefly Lane remain in my memory even though I did not have a blog post reminding me about them, so they must have appealed to me. (Those two are also personal favorites of the author herself.) I mildly disliked the helicopter mom of
Night Road and the husband wife relationship in
Distant Shores, so those books were my least favorite. But back to
Magic Hour.
The focal character Alice is most certainly memorable, and her development from a socially isolated child from the wild toward a loving, interacting young person is an amazing, awe-inspiring, and exemplary model for how persistent love can conquer seemingly impossible tasks. Psychiatrist Julie Cates continually does research into developmentally-delayed children, emotionally-mentally-impaired children, and feral children throughout the novel. I am sure in real life Kristin Hannah did similar research to enable herself to paint a realistic picture of the struggles and hopes inherent in rehabilitating a damaged child. This research must have been agonizing. I checked out some of the instances Julie refers to as historical case studies; the horrific treatment these children were subjected to was shocking and disturbing to read about.
Reading the
Wikipedia entry for feral children brings an awareness that a child raised in the wild is not as happy and rosy a picture as Mowgli from the Rudyard Kipling jungle book and the Disney jungle movies would lead one to believe.
The mistreatment of a child early on in its life has devastating consequences. The true story of
Genie, a girl discovered 1970 in Los Angeles after being confined to one room and extremely stimulation, movement, and nutrition starved by her father for thirteen years is a prime and classic example. Julie and Ellie strive hard to bring Alice back to a normal life and avoid at all costs having her become an object of scientific study into the effects of deprivation on development. Fortunately
Magic Hour does not dwell on how Alice was mistreated to become as she is, but rather focuses on the caring, dedicated efforts to bring her back to become a normal interacting member of society.
The book is very uplifting; the research necessary to make it plausible was not.
The forensic work to determine the background of how she came to be living in the woods – whether it was being separated from parents in some sort of accident, being abducted and held captive, being abandoned intentionally – make for a page turning back story, but the mystery is secondary and of concern only in terms of reuniting Alice with her family. The effect that public media could have on helping or hurting the child was worth some thought. Publicity has the power to aid in finding her family or sensationalizing her as a freak.
So why is the novel titled
Magic Hour? That phrase taken literally does not hint at the rehabilitation efforts of a needy child nor at the police efforts to locate her family. The author sets a scene at the beginning of Chapter Two, immediately before the five or six year old girl is noticed, high up in a tree beside the town square. Admittedly, even though I often skim over descriptive sections of text as sometimes superfluous, I remember this image being emblazoned in my mind as I read – and reread – it.
The rain stopped at the same time and sunlight peered through the clouds. ... It was Magic Hour, the moment in time when every leaf and blade of grass seemed separate, when sunlight burnished by the rain and softened by the coming night, gave the world an impossibly beautiful glow. ... Clouds the color of old nails moved across the sky, trying to diffuse the fading light, but now that the sun was here, it wouldn't be pushed aside. Rain Valley – all five blocks of it – seemed to glow in an otherworldly light. Brick storefronts, built one after another in the halcyon salmon-and-timber days of the seventies, shone like hammered copper.
I interpret this transitional weather phenomenon to be a symbolic hint of the transformation the little girl is about to attempt – from out of the darkness into the light – from deep, dank, dark rains into open, warm, welcoming beams of sunshine. I read a
review of Magic Hour in teenreads that took this parallel a bit further attributing it to emerging character growth of not only Alice but also Julie, Ellie, and a medical doctor friend Max. Hmm. That is another viewpoint worth pondering.
I read this book in two sittings - well rather one interrupted sitting since I
did have to sleep one night. I rate it
five stars because it had great characters almost all of whom I really liked and because all those characters acted out of concern and love. The settings were exquisitely described, so much to the extent that I took the time to dawdle over them and imbibe them. The plot was quick paced and held my interest. I almost subtracted half a star because of the somewhat disturbing topic but then I realized my discomfort arose from my poking around in research
after I had read the book.
