Finding Katie: The Diary of Anonymous, a Teenager in Foster Care [Mass Market Paperback]

Perhaps I'm being too easy on this book, but I did find it marginally better than most of the other books written by Dr. Sparks. The plot seems to have more substance than usual, and I must hand it to her for getting through an entire book without constantly breaking out into excessive italics, exclamation points, and sentences written in all caps. The book even starts out seeming like it could have been taken from (or at least based on) an actual teenager's diary instead of entirely made up by the over the hill ultra-conservative ultra-religious psychiatrist.

However, as in all of her other books, there are a number of suspicious problems. It just reads too much like a book written, in journal form, deliberately and premeditatively about a specific problem, and not drawn from the pages of a real-life teen's journal. How many teen journals has Dr. Sparks really read if she thinks that they all focus so exclusively on a certain issue in their lives? It's like she wants us to remember her characters by their problems (Katie's in foster care, Kim has an eating disorder, Nancy has AIDS, Alice does drugs, Jennie has an affair with her teacher) and not by realistic fully-rounded personalities. For example, what are Katie's favorite foods, what would she do with a million dollars, what was she like as a child, what are the types of mundane things she does to fill her time, what was going on in her life before she started having problems? In spite of being a bit better-developed than usual, the characters in this book just never really came alive for me and seemed like more than one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. Most teen journals are also composed of a lot of mundane he said-she said-type chatter, you know, writing about things besides problems in their lives. The frequent gaps in the narrative, like having several weeks between some entries, also add to the problems. And like Dr. Sparks's other characters, Katie also seems a lot younger than she's supposed to be.

Katie is a student at a Catholic girls' school (rather embodying the stereotype of the sheltered innocent Catholic schoolgirl) and living with her parents in a huge mansion, surrounded by wealth and luxury. Her mother is badly abused by her Jeckyll and Hyde father, and because of her father's controlling personality, Katie herself has never really been allowed to have friends, associate with boys, or go out and do the type of stuff most teens get to do. She gets excited about future possibilities when she and her new friend Jennifer meet two boys, Mark and David, at a museum, and secretly begin dating. In the midst of this, Katie's creepy and abusive father starts paying her unwarranted amounts of attention as soon as he notices that she's becoming a young woman. Feeling starved for love, she accepts his sudden lavish attention, not realising till it's too late that he's behaving in an extremely inappropriate and gross way. Things come to a head when he finds out she's been dating and dumps her in a very run-down area of L.A. Katie can't take her new environment, and while she's praying (being rather religious and concerned about repentance like all of Dr. Sparks's other creations) before going to kill herself, she's found by a man from the Salvation Army, who takes her to a shelter, and from there she gets put into foster care. Sadly, the depictions of foster care, and the children in it, seem to be pretty accurate instead of, as is Dr. Sparks's usual forte, made up or wildly exaggerated to scare her target audience.

As realistic as the foster care section of the book appears to be, however, this scenario just doesn't fit together at all. Why doesn't anyone from Katie's home, school, or small circle of friends ever attempt to contact the police or search for her? We're supposed to believe her horrid father just throws her onto the streets and no one ever is suspicious about why she just suddenly disappeared? Even in an abusive situation or a rich family that seems beyond belief, that no authorities would ever get suspicious! And why doesn't Katie herself want to go back home, or at least to another relative or someone who cares? At one point later on she does call her dad's secretary, who is happy to hear from her, but Katie can't even tell her where she is, nor does this secretary ever apparently get in touch with anyone from Katie's old life. And though she is frustrated, depressed, and angry over the situations she's been thrust into, Katie seems to adapt a little too quickly to her new life as a foster child, in foster homes, and in a crummy school two grades behind her actual grade (she lied about her age when she was found).

Wouldn't most teens, particularly if they came from education, manners, and money, like Katie is always talking about, be fighting tooth and nail to go back to where they came from instead of just accepting the situation? Instead she focuses on helping the other kids in her foster homes to become as mannered, educated, ambitious, and socially skilled as she is (with many mentions of prayer, religion, and repentance, of course). Now I could see this had Katie gone into foster care as a child, but for someone who's sixteen to just adapt that readily and without a fight? Coupled with her juvenile attitude and writing style in spite of being almost eighteen at the book's end, it just defies plausibility! Another example of an implasible scenario is when two of the boys at Katie's original foster home try to assault a little girl in the home, and just disappear after Katie fights them off to protect the child. There's no police investigation, and these boys are never heard from again. Social services never look for them. And again, why would anyone be expected to believe that a teenager from a rich privileged family can just disappear like that with no one ever investigating the matter and starting a search for her? The ending of the book also seems a bit hard to swallow, given the grim reality most foster kids Katie's age face when it comes to finding adoptive parents. It's also hard to believe how many of these younger kids so easily come under her wing and quickly change their bad/unresponsive/rough/uneducated/bad-mannered ways to her way of thinking and living, but again, this is a book written by someone who seems to have a poor grasp of just how modern teens think, act, write, talk, and behave.

There's a bit of supplementary material in the back on child abuse, crisis hotlines, abductions, and throwaway children. The back matter seems skimpier than usual, not as extensive as the appendices in her books on subjects like AIDS and teen pregnancy. Even though it started out seeming like it could have come from a real teen's journal, ultimately it turned out to be just a typical Dr. Sparks book. The only real difference here is that it does have a bit stronger plot than usual.

This is a fast-moving book written as a diary of a 16-yr.-old girl who came from a wealthy family that was sexually abused by her own father who dumped her on Skid Row in Los Angeles to fend for herself. She was "rescued" by the Salvation Army and tells her story about being in foster homes and finally finding someone who wanted her so ends on a happy note. Even through it all, she show great maturity and compassion for the other kids in the foster homes she was placed in. She helped several of them by tutoring them, befriending them and caring for them. She found happiness by helping others which seemed to me to be the message of this book in addition to showing that foster care can sometimes be good and other times not so good.

I just would like to say that, I think this book was absolutley fabulous! It was a little difficult to get into, but once you're into it you are! Katie does tend to feel sorry for herself and not give herself enough credit however i feel we have all been there one day or another. Exellent read!