My Amazon and Goodreads review of Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother’s Disappearance as a Child (Rating 3) – A Wordy Book About a Taciturn Town. In Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother’s Disappearance as a Child, Laura Cumming sets out to solve the intriguing mystery of her mother’s brief abduction at age three. Her mother did not learn of the incident for decades. Nor was she told she was adopted until ten years after her disappearance. About both instances, her parents were close-mouthed, as was the entire village. Cumming seeks to uncover the facts of the kidnapping, and more challenging, to learn why the townsfolk remained so taciturn. She therefore goes into great detail about the rural English landscape and historical setting, details which interest Cumming as she investigates her roots, but won’t engage readers because they fail to explain the silence. We are also introduced to many characters, who are hard to keep straight because many don’t come to life on the page. As a fiction writer who extensively researches my books (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I’ve learned to only include information that furthers character and plot development. Cumming is too self-absorbed to pare down her narrative. Because her mother (and father) were artists, she draws analogies between famous paintings or photos and people and scenes in her search. Some succeed; too many are forced. Most disappointing, while Cumming paints a loving and sympathetic portrait of her mother, readers don’t emerge with any deep insights into why, decades hence, the community still refuses to talk.
