In “Hand Me Down” (Dutton) by Melanie Thorne, Liz Reid’s 12-year-old sister delivers the bad news: “Terrence is getting out next month.”
The sex offender their mother has married is being released from prison and moving in with them. Liz’s sister, Jaime, immediately flees to live with their alcoholic father. But Liz, having seen their father beat their mother innumerable times.
She’ll try to make it work.
And so she ignores it when Terrence touches her, and tries to block out the sounds of sex coming from her mother’s bedroom. She doesn’t complain when her mother buys Terrence a new set of weights instead of getting her children shoes.
And when her mother tells her she must move out, Liz cries. A lousy home is better than no home, and Liz’s sense of security is tied to her mother. Her mother took the blows from her father to protect the girls. But now she has chosen: Terrence will stay, Liz will go.
Liz and her sister soon find themselves shuttled among relatives: Terrence’s brother, their father, one aunt and then another.
Melanie Thorne’s debut novel is raw with emotion as she describes Liz’s often futile efforts to protect her sister and herself. It is often hard to remember that this is, in fact, a novel and not a memoir. In a letter tucked in the front of the book, Thorne writes:
“My mom married a convicted sex offender,” she writes. “Like Liz, I was ‘asked’ to leave my home. And, like Liz, I was separated from my little sister. I still wonder what would have been different if my mom had forced her husband to leave instead of her daughters.”
Thorne’s novel is an eye-opener. Nobody would disagree with a policy preventing sex offenders from living with young girls, but there’s almost no public discussion of what that means in practical terms.
Liz eventually finds a safe home, but Thorne makes it clear her path still won’t be easy, and she leaves the reader haunted by a nagging question: What happens to the children who are not so lucky?