by Barbara Gowdy
Publishers Weekly summed it up best when they called Helpless "...chilling but not always believable." Celia is a young single mother working two jobs to make ends meet. Her nine year old daughter Rachel is smart, mature for her age, and strikingly beautiful with mocha skin and light hair. Ron is a lonely, demented, small appliance repairman who spots Rachel in the schoolyard one day. He quickly becomes obsessed with the little girl and soon begins to renovate a room in his basement from storage for his old vacuum cleaner collection into a perfect bedroom for a little girl, complete with big screen tv, dolls, videos, and an enormous dollhouse. One night, Ron snatches Rachel from her home during a blackout.
The narration of the story shifts among each of the main characters and as the story progresses we learn about the point of view and past of each person. One of the main problems is that Ron is super creepy and I didn't care about his troubled past or his strange thought processes. Rachel is very mature at the beginning of the book but a few days later, the reader is supposed to believe that she really thinks Ron is protecting her from slave drivers roaming the streets of Toronto in search of little girls to send back to Africa. Suspenseful at times but just not believable to me.
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