I really liked the premise of this story. As an adult, Kim is going about her day teaching at a school in Australia, when she's approached by a stranger and given a picture of a little girl who disappeared 28 years ago. The man tells her he thinks she is that little girl and the story is off and running. Kim begins researching the story of little Sammy Wents who went missing at age 2 in Kentucky. After much digging and putting pieces together, Kim decides she very well might be Sammie and agrees to travel back to Kentucky to find out for sure.

The story is narrated in alternating time frames which usually doesn't work for me and this was no exception. I found myself not caring about the past storyline, in fact, I found it weird. Lots of talk about cults, religious fanaticism, and way too many snakes for me. I was much more invested in the present day storyline but soon became bored with that too. I didn't connect with Kim nor any of the other characters and overall the story felt scattered and in cohesive to me

The Nowhere Child was a quick and interesting thriller about a little girl who went missing back in 1990 and the present day woman who is thought to be her.

It alternates between past and present really well and keeps a breakneck pace. I really enjoyed the characters and the interesting angle of the religion involved. 4 ⭐️, it took me 4.5 hours to read. Thank you to @netgalley and @stmartinspress for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

This was one of those 'can't put it down' books. I love that! It's a unique take on a child kidnapping case and the story weaves back and forth between the present time and 28 years ago. There are interesting characters and horrible situations (I'm talking religions where people handle poisonous snakes. Yikes!!)

This had me guessing all through the book and though I halfway guessed part of the outcome, it wasn't until the final reveal that I knew for sure. I'm not sure I liked the ending but I definitely liked the journey getting there.

I want to start my review off with a warning - when you pick this book up to read, just go ahead and block off the rest of your day or weekend because you won't be able to put it down!!!!

I had read some early reviews on this book that caught my attention and the description of the book intrigued me. And this book did not disappoint at all. It grabs hold of you pretty quickly and you just have to keep reading to find out what happens and why it happens. There are a lot of psychological thrillers out there. There are a lot of books around child abductions out there. There are tons that are a combination of two. And then there is this book - The Nowhere Child. The author puts a spin unlike one I've read in this genre before. An interesting, very clever spin. And on top of that, he throws out curve balls to keep you just slightly off your guessing game in figuring out this riddle. It's not as clear cut as you may think in the beginning. I thoroughly enjoyed trying to solve the mystery of who took Sammy Went and why.

What I think impressed me the most is that this book is the authors debut novel. I can't wait to see what is next in the pipeline for Christian White!!!! This is a novel to read and an author to keep your eyes on.

My thanks to Christian White, St. Martin's Press and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A compelling thriller full of twists and turns, secrets and lies, and snakes!🐍 what would you do if you found out you weren’t who you thought you were your entire life? How would you react if you found out you weren’t Kim Australian photography teacher, but Sammy Kentuckian kidnap victim? This book starts with a BANG and maintains it’s intensity until the very end... A brilliantly crafted perfectly paced debut... BRAVO Christian White!

Kim is leading a relatively uneventful life in Australia.... she has a job she enjoys, a sister who loves her, and she is beginning to get it together after losing her mother to cancer.... then one day a strange American shows up with a picture... a picture of a two-year-old girl who he insists is her.... a two-year-old Sammy Who was kidnapped over 20 years ago from a small town in Kentucky, a two-year-old Sammy who happens to be the sister of the strange American Stew.... after a DNA test and confronting her stepfather, Kim decides to head to America to meet her birth family and to figure out how in the world she ended up in Australia? Kim was expecting some culture shock, but she could not begin to imagine how much culture shock she would be in for....

The book seamlessly weaves the past and present storylines together... it was truly fascinating watching Kim navigate her way through small town Kentucky, meeting her birth family, including her mother who is a snake handler in the Pentecostal church.... The past story was equally intriguing... learning about the family at the time of Sammy‘s disappearance, and trying to figure out the how and the who of it all.... as the layers of both past and present were peeled away the creepier and more intricate the deception got.... and the snakes, oh boy those creepy slithery slimy snakes! Yikes! There are parts of this book that still give me the heebie-jeebies!

An intense story that will satisfy your psychological thriller craving! A trope you may have read before, but with a shiny new unique brilliant twist! This is a thriller not to be missed! Absolutely recommend!

🎧🎧🎧 The narrator of this audiobook was Katherine Littrell and I have only two words for you... AUSTRALIAN ACCENT! She did a really good job, even her American male accents were well done... and I appreciated the fact that she did not even attempt to do a southern accent, sometimes that accent can be a bit over exaggerated... as always the audio narration breathed even more life into this already highly entertaining story, a definite must listen!

🎵🎵🎵 song running through my head... Australia makes me think of this song and having that Australian accent in my ear throughout this book really made me think of this song!

”Traveling in a fried-out combie
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie
I met a strange lady, she made me nervous
She took me in and gave me breakfast
And she said
Do you come from a land down under?
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover
Buying bread from a man in Brussels
He was six-foot-four and full of muscles
I said, "do you speak-a my language?"
He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich
And he said
I come from a land down under
Where beer does flow and men chunder
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover, yeah”
- Men at Work 1981

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hfmxO-HQ5rU

*** The other song I was contemplating was “Union of the Snake” by Duran Duran, I’m such an 80s girl!

*** A huge thank you to Macmillan Audio/Minotaur Books for my copies of this book ***

The Nowhere Child by Christian White was an AWESOME book. It was twisty and turny and kept me guessing the whole way through. It centers around Kim(berly) Leamy, a photographer/photography teacher in Australia, who finds out very early on that that's not her real name - in fact, nothing she thought about her childhood was true. This book sends characters halfway around the world in search for the truth and it does not stop until the very end. Superb, and I can't wait for more from this author!

**thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy.

Unique take on the kidnapped child comes home sub-genre. Kim, an Australian photography teacher could not have anything less in common with 2 year old Sammie who was kidnapped from a fundamentalist religious family in Kentucky, USA 28 years ago… or so she thinks. I was not only wrapped up in the mystery of what happened to Sammie so many years ago but in the soul-searching Kim goes through in processing that her identity may be different than she thought her whole life. Enjoyable read.

Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press and the author Christian White for an advanced electronic review copy.

Unputdownable. I couldn't put it down once I started reading it. It's so vivid and realistic because it truly is something that can happen to you. Make sure you make plenty of time to read this winner of a book. Happy reading!

What if everything you thought you knew about your life turned out to be a lie?

That's exactly the situation in which Kim Leamy, a photography teacher in Melbourne, Australia finds herself, when a stranger shows up declaring she is his little sister, Sammy, who disappeared from their home in Manson, Kentucky when she was 2 years old.

Needing to find out the truth, Kim travels to Manson, Kentucky, a small town as different from Melbourne in character as the distance between them in miles. Where to start? And who to believe? Every time Kim/Sammy thinks she has gotten a piece of the puzzle of her life, she is left with more questions. And there are lots of secrets to uncover in Manson!

This is one terrific psychological suspense novel; even more impressive because it's a debut novel! Well-told in chapters alternating between Then and Now, Christian White does a fine job of developing characters that are believable, and making the reader feel part of the action as Kim discovers the truth of who she is.

This is an author worth watching, and I look forward to reading his future books. A new talent has arrived on the scene - hooray!!!

Kudos to Christian White and many thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for allowing me to read an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is a mystery with lots of twists and turns that will please readers of psychological thrillers. The striking rural Kentucky setting lends an air of intrigue and menace to the story. Describe this to readers as "The Face on the Milk Carton" but grown up and hand to fans of psychological thrillers set in small towns like Krysten Ritter's Bonfire.

What would you do if you lived your entire life thinking you were someone other than who you were? Would you want to find out the truth.

“The Nowhere Child” is the debut novel by Christian White and tells the story of Kim Leamy, a photography professor in Australia. Kim is approached by a man from the US who shows her a photograph of a two year old girl, Sammy Went. He tells Kim that he thinks she is this girl who was kidnapped 30 years prior. Kim goes to the US to uncover the truth, but is the truth really worth finding out?

Christian White did a great job of creating an interesting take on a kidnapped child storyline by giving it some twists. The setting in Kentucky was interesting, and I learned about the Pentecostal church and some of their beliefs. It gave this story a unique twist. I definitely look forward to reading more of White’s novels once they are released.

Thank you NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books, and Christian White for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Tl;dr: Watch Justified instead.

I thought Nowhere Child was okay--it has a great premise, which is that Kim, an almost 30 year old woman living in Melbourne. Australia, finds out she might actually be Sammy West, who was abducted from her home in Manson, Kentucky 28 years ago--but it lacked a sense of place, which is pretty important when your main character is suddenly on a trip that starts in metro Australia and moves to rural Kentucky.

As I mentioned, the premise is great, and Nowhere Child has good pacing too, making it a fast read. And I liked Kim--she was very steady overall, which, considering the circumstances she finds herself in, is no small feat.

Aside from Kim, Stuart--a possible brother--and the sections of The Nowhere Child narrated right before and after the abduction by Emma, Stuart and Sammy's older sister, who is already growing up too fast and is forced to lurch into adulthood way too soon (my heart ached for her, and I thought Emma's sections were the best in the book)--the rest of the characters were very one dimensional.

Everyone in the past and present Kentucky of The Nowhere Child has their secrets, but they're all so easily obtained that any strength they might have had is lost in how obvious they are. And it's as if everyone that Kim meets in America is assigned a role straight out of cliche central, from the noble but overwhelmed sheriff to Sammy's struggling with their inner turmoil parents right on down to the snake handling fundamentalists who rattle (couldn't resist!) around being menacing.

For a book that's as much about Kim understanding who she really is as finding out who she really is, I found the lack of depth in almost all the characters odd, and it didn't help that The Nowhere Child's Kentucky felt like it could have been set anywhere.

Hence the reference to Justified, which made its fictional Harlan, Kentucky into as much of a character as the characters, and which is definitely missing in The Nowhere Child's Manson, Kentucky.

Overall, The Nowhere Child is okay. I'd read another book by Christian White, but I hope that in the next one all the characters are as developed as the plot and the setting adds to the story instead of just being there.

What a terrific debut! Kim has enough to cope with when Stuart approaches her and claims that she is his long lost sister. It doesn't make sense- she grew up in Melbourne with a loving but now deceased mom and Stuart is from Manson, Kentucky. When her stepfather waggles on explanations, and DNA shows she really is Sammy, she heads to the US. Can two places be any more different? Well, no and that's where this gets interesting. Kim's birth mother, Molly, is deeply involved with a religious group that handles snakes as part of the worship. (as an aside- yuck!). Told in dual time lines, this is about a woman finding the truth about her past. Even as there are times when things get a little nuts, there are also wonderful twists that will keep you guessing. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. A really good read.

<em>The Nowhere Child</em> is a contemporary mystery with a premise that reminded me of some teen thrillers that were popular in the early 2000s. What happens to a person who discovers that the life she thought she knew is built on a lie? What if it turns out that your parents aren't really your parents? How would you handle finding out that you were kidnapped, way back before you were old enough to remember, and that you have an entirely other family out there in the world?

Kim's life is turned upside down when a stranger shows up claiming that she's his long-lost sister. DNA testing quickly proves that they are in fact siblings. But Kim knows that her mother was a good, loving person -- how could she be a kidnapper?

Kim agrees to go to the United States with Stuart to meet her biological sister and parents, to see the Kentucky town where she was born, and to try to unravel the mystery of her disappearance. What happened all those years ago? Who took her, and why? And how did she end up growing up in Australia with woman she believed to be her mother?

The town of Manson, Kentucky has its own creepy secrets, among them a formerly popular pentecostal congregation with an outsized influence on its members, including Sammy/Kim's mother Molly. Church members bear their snake bite scars as badges of honor -- those who survive, anyway. As the narrative switches back and forth between Kim's present trip to Manson and the past, almost thirty years earlier, when Sammy disappeared from her home, the clues and connections start to add up. And while Kim/Sammy's kidnapping happened so many years ago, there's still a threat lurking in the town when she comes too close to uncovering the truth.

I enjoyed the story and the puzzle of trying to figure out exactly what happened to Sammy, and the description of the different family members, townspeople, and their secrets. Some of the threads between "then" and "now" seemed a little flimsy to me, but overall, the plot is pieced together in such a way that the answers aren't too obvious. I had a pretty good idea of whose stories had holes and where the missing connection might be, but it was still interesting to see it all come together.

We never really see much of Kim's life in Australia, and I would have liked that piece of her life to be better fleshed out, especially to have seen more memories of her time with her mother. It felt like an important piece was missing, to see how Kim was raised and what her relationship with her mother was like. Likewise, it wasn't entirely clear to me why some of the people in Kentucky in the "now" timeline acted as they did, and even once we had all the answers about the kidnapping, I'm not convinced that the motivation for taking and keeping Sammy made a whole lot of sense.

There's a truly disturbing scene toward the end of the book that absolutely made my skin crawl. I mean, super icky and scary. Let's just say that if you have a problem with reptiles and rodents, you should proceed with caution!

Overall, <em>The Nowhere Child</em> is a good, solid read that held my interest, even when I didn't quite buy every element of the story. If anyone else has read it, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

4.5/5 stars

Kim Leamy is a photography teacher living in Australia. One day she is approached by a man named Stuart who tells her about a two-year-old child who disappeared twenty-six years earlier from Manson, Kentucky named Sammy Went. A little girl who was his sister. A little girl who he believes is Kim Leamy. Kim can’t believe what she is hearing from Stuart. There’s no way her mother kidnapped her and crossed International lines just to call a toddler her own.

When Stuart supplies Kim with proof that their DNA shows a biological match she can no longer deny that she is in fact Sammy Went. In an attempt to understand what happened almost thirty years ago, Kim travels to America to reunite with the family she never knew was related to her. Kim is also determined to find out what happened to her so many years ago and what lead to her mother kidnapping her. With a hefty dose of religious fanaticism and a town full of secrets, this is a child abduction story you won’t solve before the big reveal!

Christian White has already won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for THE NOWHERE CHILD and it’s easy to see why so many people have given this book praise. In White’s debut thriller he explores the disappearance of Sammy Went side-by-side with Kim Leamy attempting to come to terms with being that missing child and discovering what happened so many years ago. The parallel timelines of “then” and “now” weave together in a harmony that has the truth of the past being revealed at the same time as Kim is discovering her own answers. I love when authors master this parallel timeline structure because it gives the reader an opportunity to experience first hand what happened in the past, along with how those actions impact the present day.

White’s writing style is one that instantly drew me into the story. He certainly doesn’t hold back with several revelations about the Went family early on in the book. These revelations create a depth to the family, as well as the past, which for me I found captivating. I think it’s safe to say I adored the glimpses into the past! My love for the past timeline in no way took away from my desire to follow Kim’s journey into her disappearance in the present. I was invested with her discovery, but leaned more towards the drama in the past. It could also be that I’m greatly intrigued by religious fanaticism that borders on cult-like behavior, which there is plenty of in the past timeline!

I’m thrilled that Minotaur Books has brought this book to a US audience, as I think it is one that will be greatly received. I had not had the pleasure of hearing about this book prior to learning of this release, but it is certainly one I think deserves a flurry of hype! If you’re looking for a story that is largely thriller, but also serves up a side of religious fanaticism and family drama, than THE NOWHERE CHILD needs to be on your TBR!

Goodreads blurb: "Winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, The Nowhere Child is a thriller of psychological suspense about a woman uncovering devastating secrets about her family- and her very identity."

Review: Despite promising reviews on Goodreads, there was something about this novel that was really underwhelming for me. I typically enjoy thrillers, this one was told in an alternating timeline, which I also usually enjoy. There were some plot lines, like the religious fanaticism that seemed so underdeveloped that they were more distracting than anything. I never really connected to any of the characters, and I found myself not really caring for any of them. I never felt completely pulled into the story. If I could describe this story in one word, it would be "meh." 3/5. Thank you @netgalley for this free e-ARC.

This book is one of those that really captured my interest right in the beginning. While, I normally have a hard time with missing children, there was so much disturbing things and chilling events, I couldn’t help but love it! Thrilling, chilling, and completely engaging.
I will be highly recommending and using in a challenge in chapter chatter pub!

Twenty six years ago, a toddler named Sammy Went disappeared from a small rural town in Kentucky and was never found. Kim, a photographer living in Australia, is approached by a stranger and told that she might be that missing girl. Long story short, DNA confirms she is that little girl. It's revealed pretty early on that Kim and Sammy are the same. But the mystery remains on who and why. Family drama, religious cults, snakes, it's got it all. In the end, I couldn't help but wonder if her 'mother' did her a favor by taking her away. She's doing well in Australia...who knows what/how she would've turned out if she was still living in Kentucky under the cult that was so prevalent in their town. Anyway, that's just my 2 cents! Definitely recommend this debut!

This!! This book right here. “Jaw drops” Yep that’s literally what I did while reading this book. This is an awesome debut and I can’t wait to see what the author has in store

With a great premise, this book just didn’t grab me the way I hoped it would. Told in two timelines, past and present, I found the past storyline of the cult to be much more intriguing than the present storyline. I do have to say that the snake part was cringe worthy!!! Many aspects of this book were over the top and unrealistic, but it was an entertaining read and a good debut.