‘The rawness of her hunger – the utter fierceness of her desire to return home – is what provided Ginny’s motivation’
The book is about Ginny, a recently adopted autistic teenager who plots to get herself kidnapped by her birth-mother. I wrote the book, in part, because of a personal experience. My wife and I are foster/adoptive parents, and adopted a young lady with autism in 2009. When she first came to live with us we were excited and enthusiastic, but it quickly became apparent that every success and victory – every good thing that would make any other child feel proud – would be overshadowed by the rift left behind when she was taken from her mother. Here was a child, it seemed, who couldn’t be happy. She could smile and laugh, but for a long, long time there was no lasting sense of joy or contentment.
It’s probably no surprise that virtually all displaced children feel the same way. We’d been warned ahead of time that our daughter would miss her mother, but now we had to deal with the fact that we could never replace what she’d lost. We were fortunate in that she was a very easy child, at least in terms of behaviour. She never tried to run away or to do any of the disturbing things that Ginny tries in the book. She’s nineteen, and back in regular contact with her birth-mom, and all of us get along just fine.
Still, the rawness of her hunger – the utter fierceness of her desire to return home – is what provided Ginny’s motivation. So I really, really hope that this book will show readers what an incredibly hard time kids have in the foster-care system, and after they’re adopted. To live without one’s mother, knowing that she’s still out there somewhere, is to live with an awful, almost unbearable feeling of disconnect. I also hope the book will show what a huge difference fostering and adopting can make in a child’s life, as well as in the life of a fostering/adopting parent.
-Benjamin Ludwig, author of Ginny Moon
Ginny Moon
Benjamin Ludwig
1st June 2017
HQ
Hardback
9781848455429
RRP £12.99
Limited number of proofs available – Email Ammara @ independenthinking@harpercollins.co.uk to request one now
