Finding Avalon

Finding Avalon follows Avalon Monday, a 15-year-old girl, as she navigates the difficult terrain of re-building a relationship with an absent parent who has caused her emotional harm. In Avalon’s case, her mother, Vivian, has been in jail for three years, the result of Vivian’s actions while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. We join Avalon on an afternoon of firsts: arriving home fresh from being offered her first job, Avalon finds a letter from her mother, the first attempt at contact in the time she has been in jail.

Avalon is happy – she and her father have moved since the incident, and none of her new friends know the true nature of her mother’s absence (she tells them her mom ran away to California with a boyfriend from the Internet), she was just hired at Party Portal, her dream job, and she maintains a strong relationship with Lana, her best friend from childhood and the one friend who did not turn against her after her mother’s arrest. Does Avalon even want to give her mother a chance to be a part of her life? Does she trust that her mother doesn’t have ulterior motives for contacting her now, after all these years? Avalon begins a hesitant correspondence with her mother, the beginning of allowing the past she tried so hard to leave behind to become a part of her new, present life. The boundary Avalon built between her old and new lives continues to fragment, with a former friend from her old school showing up at a party and informing all of Avalon’s new friends a fantastical version of what Avalon’s mother did to end up in jail. Avalon now also must navigate learning to trust her new friends and allowing them to know the truth of her life’s experience. None of these developments are shown as trite, or with tidy after-school-special instant resolution, but instead explore the nuanced ways in which her friends deal with being entrusted with the truth, from immediate acceptance to a bit of schoolyard gossip.

Pamela MacDonald and Valerie Sherrard do a masterful job of portraying the complex emotions and reactions that come with navigating childhood trauma. Avalon’s reactions to her mother ring true – she is dealing with feelings of betrayal and abandonment, anger, and, of course, love for and mourning of the mother that she did not have the chance to grow up with. From her indecision about allowing her mother back in to her life, to her struggle to decide if she should address her mom as Mom, or by her first name, to her attempt to keep the true nature of her mother’s absence from her new friends, Avalon’s decisions and struggles are all treated with respect and equal importance.

Finding Avalon, while dealing with heavy subjects, is an engaging read and portrays a youth living her own life while also dealing with her own childhood trauma. This is a positive portrayal for young people who have experienced loss of, or betrayal by, an adult in a position of trust and authority, showing it’s okay to worry as much about if your crush likes you back as it is to think about rebuilding a broken relationship with a parent. Too often narratives of trauma focus more on the trauma and its effects than the whole person, and, happily here, Avalon is a well-rounded character who is living with trauma and not defined only by the loss of her relationship with her mother. Finding Avalon would appeal widely to readers who prefer narratives set in our reality and would be suitable for youth who have experienced a loss of a relationship with a trusted adult figure in their life.