300 Days of Sun

Joanna "Jo" Millard has lost her job and escaped her long-term relationship.  She has come to Portugal to learn Portuguese with vague plans for rebooting her career as a journalist.  While taking language classes in Faro, she meets Nathan Emberlin.  Nathan is a lively young fellow who asks her advice for finding people.  He wants to find a family friend.  Jo makes some inquiries and soon meets Ian, an English Expat who urges her to read a 1953 book that is a thinly disguised autobiography of the author.  The book tells the tale of a woman who escaped Paris and took refuge with her husband in Lisbon.  The book switches from the first person account of Jo in the present to the 3rd person account of Alva Barton in the 1940s.

 

The book never decides what it is.  Is it a mystery, a thriller, a historical fiction novel, a romance, a travelogue?  It is a mixture of all of the above.  If one had to pick the central theme, the issue that most needs resolution, it would be child abduction.  The prologue opens in the late 1940s with Alva searching desperately for her son on a beach.  Has he been taken?  Nathan believes that he was abducted in the early 1990s and enlists Jo to help him dig up the story.  Clearly, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007 is inspiration for some of the story.  It is initially proposed that lots of kids have vanished from the Algarve region but the book doesn't pursue that beyond Nathan.  There is a villain who doesn't appear until the end of the third act and is easily overcome.  He was never a real threat, just a boogeyman to provide some tension for Jo and Nathan.

 

It is an easy read and keeps one's interest but the conclusion is a letdown.  Worse, it provides a couple pages where Jo tells how her relationship with Nathan finally ended and that she still has doubts about whether he found his real parents or not.  They lived ambivalently ever after.  Meh.

 

The author's note discusses how she had gone on a junket to Portugal in the 80s and told her various hosts and guides that she would write a glowing piece.  At the time, she only managed to get a few paragraphs published and felt a bit guilty.  So, this book is an apology?  An effort to write the promised piece several decades later?  As with the ambivalent epilogue, this author's note could have been nixed.