Book Review
The Names They Gave Us
By Emery Lord
Of the books I’ve read that include a religious main character trying to find his or her way in the world, I think this is the best one of the bunch. The main character, Lucy, is the only daughter of a pastor and wife who run a summer camp. Her mother had a bout with cancer a couple of years before the book starts, and now the disease has come back at the beginning of summer. Lucy’s strong willed and plans to throw herself completely into caring for her mother while helping at the summer camp, but it turns out her mother’s just as strong-willed. She sets up Lucy with a job at Daybreak, a camp on the other side of the lake. There, she’ll be counseling troubled children, only getting to see her mom on Sundays. Lucy is unhappy enough about that when her boyfriend decides to put their relationship on pause because she “seems to be on the wrong path,” doing things like swearing after she finds out her mother is sick, but then she has to adjust to life at the camp for troubled kids, where one of them is a pregnant 14-year-old. The story of her adjusting to the motley bunch of counselors she’s working with at Daybreak is told with warmth, beauty, and humor. The longer she’s there, the more she gets the sense that there are some secrets that her mother is keeping from her.
My favorite line in the book has to be when her boyfriend says “I’ll be praying for you,” and she says, “I’ll be praying for you, too,” adding on in her mind that she’ll be praying for his chickenpox vaccine to fail and for him to spend the summer covered in red dots.
There are a few weak points in the book, too, including some really long gaps in the subplot about the mother’s secrets. When the big reveal happened, I thought, wow, I almost forgot Lucy cared about that. Also, the construction of Lucy’s character has some holes — the book opens with Lucy as a swim team captain, helping out a younger girl having a makeup crisis at a dance, and then the author tries to convince us Lucy doesn’t really have friends. Kinda contradictory.
On balance, though, it’s a lovely book of faith, growth, and heartbreak, and I recommend it heartily.
