"Was it possible to be kidnapped by your own father?" queries the cover of Taking Terri Mueller by Norma Fox Mazer.
Perhaps more importantly, "Is it possible for the marketing division of Avon Books to ruin the first half of the book you're about to read by giving away the Terrible Secret on the cover of the book itself?!?"
Why yes. Yes it is.
You see, Taking Terri Mueller is a 189 page book, and Terri doesn't figure out just why her life is so strange until page 90-something. But the reader knows all along exactly why Terri's life is so strange because of the incomprehensible decision to give away the whole megillah in big blue letters right above the book's title. This marketing decision is rendered even more puzzling when you open the book and see this: "Winner of the Edgar Award - Best Young Mystery Novel."
Okay, so while you're still scratching your head over giving away the mysterious part of the mystery on the front cover, let me just say that this is still a riveting book for its first half. Yes, I know I said they "ruined" it, but that was merely hyperbole for humorous effect.
Here's the gist: Terri, age 13, is just beginning to realize how truly strange the life is that she and her father lead. She has no memory of her mother, who died (so her father says) in a car accident when she was 4. All she can remember is life on the move with her father - every few months they pull up stakes and go off to another state. Dad makes a meager living doing handyman jobs and carpentry for cash. Terri has a long string of best friends, left behind suddenly at the string of schools she's attended. They live in dumpy rent-by-the-month apartments or sometimes in the camper over the flatbed of their truck.
Terri and her father have only each other. There is no other family, save for her father's sister, Aunt Vivian, who visits once a year. But at this year's annual visit, Terri finally begins to ask herself why. Other kids have aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents...why doesn't she? Why have they never visited Aunt Vivian? Why does Aunt Vivian call from a phone booth? And who are the man and boys in those snapshots Terri saw in Aunt Vivian's purse while fishing out her pack of Players?
Even though you know (thanks a heap, Avon!) what Terri's father's Terrible Secret is, it's still compelling to watch it all unravel as Terri asks him more and more difficult questions and finally takes matters into her own hands by breaking into the lockbox where he keeps important papers. What she finds in there forces the truth to come tumbling out in a way that will change all of their lives forever.
After this point, the novel loses some momentum, but it doesn't cheat by positing easy answers to the situation. Terri continues to love her father, even as she realizes how reprehensibly he acted. She longs to see and know her mother, but it isn't all smooth sailing there, either. Nancy, Dad's well-meaning girlfriend, is caring, but confused and ultimately ineffectual. Aunt Vivian, who undoubtedly loves Terri, also loves her "baby brother" and will stand by him no matter what he's done.
Ultimately, Terri can't look to any of the adults to solve her problems, or offer anything other than their own emotional baggage and rationalizations. She must find the strength and wisdom within herself to go on in the face of calamity...a hallmark, I think, of many young adult books of this period. Perhaps at no other time have adults in print been so universally condemned as ineffectual (at best) than in the YA novels of the 1970s. No doubt this was a reaction to the perfect, wise sages who inhabited kids' books in all the preceding decades, but in its way, it was almost as false. I mean, surely Terri might have one competent, helpful adult in her orbit? A free-spirited artist neighbor who wears handpainted silk scarves? A hip English teacher? But no.
Nonetheless, Taking Terri Mueller is an enjoyable rainy day read: compelling for its first half, interesting for its second, with (it must be said) a bit of a letdown due to the ambiguous ending (need I add, another hallmark of the era). Oh, and extra Groovy Points (tm) for Terri's best friend being named Shaundra, a moniker so funky it's even misspelled more than once as Saundra. Now that's '70s.
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