The Hiding Place Girl

by Robin Martin

When she was a child, Renae and a boy named Patrick were friends. They shared secret adventures. They shared secret hiding places. But they never told each other about the secret worlds hidden inside their houses. Their sharing stopped one fall afternoon when Patrick walked home from school and opened his front door to find something terrible had happened while he was gone.
Sixteen years later, Renae’s father dies suddenly. Staring at his casket in the funeral home, she feels a release, and tumbles back in memories to untangle the connections between herself as a young girl and the woman she has become. Her memories begin with Patrick, and in them she finds that the fearful choices she made when they were childhood friends are the same choices she’s been making ever since. Because the secret world of the house she grew up in has been following her around.
Set in the South during the social and sexual turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, The Hiding Place Girl is a haunting look at a time past, and a painfully truthful telling of an American girl's typically secret adolescence and young adulthood.

248 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 6, 2013

Reviews

[Shona · Rating 5 out of 5]

The intriguing phrase: “Enough people are dead now. I can talk about some things.” kicks off “The Hiding Place Girl” with a bang – and within a few pages you can see why the narrator felt the need to wait. Robin Martin’s character depictions are painfully accurate in every way – and in a way that would make me feel almost sorry for some of her victims, if they weren’t such awful people.

The best of writers have their own unique voice and Robin Martin has this, so much so that it spills off every page and gets right into your head. She has the rare skill of building a sense of atmosphere is so strong that at times it’s hard to breathe. She strips her heroine, Renae, right down to the bones for the reader, revealing so much, that Renae is one of the most developed literary characters I’ve ever come across. Robin also has a knack for combining humor with painful emotions and she exploits this to the full as Renae attempts to find her way through life, from a difficult childhood through to an even more difficult early adulthood.

A couple of years ago, I was honored to read some of the first few chapters of this book in an earlier form and you will see my name in the credits at the end – thank you Robin. I love those chapters and the completed story more than lives up to my expectations - I have no hesitation in giving this book five stars.

This book is utterly realistic and utterly beautiful. Don’t rush through it, it’s one to savor.

[Les Edgerton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve just turned the last page on a wondrous book, titled The Hiding Place Girl by Robin Martin. I’m just now getting my breath back. I’ve only experienced the feeling I got from Robin’s book a couple of other times. One was when I finished Dr. Richard Selzer’s Letters to a Young Doctor. I was in one of my MFA residencies when I read Dr. Selzer’s book and the next morning, I was privileged to eat breakfast with him. Later that day, he gave a talk to the student body and faculty and afterward, I was walking on the grounds in an absolute daze after the experience and a fellow classmate came running up to me, telling me he’d gotten stuck in town and hadn’t been able to make it.

“How was his talk?” he said.

I thought for a long moment. I didn’t have the words to describe the experience. Finally (and weakly), I came up with my answer. “It was like being in a cathedral and hearing the voice of God,” I said. And it was. Dr. Selzer had deeply touched every good emotion a human being is capable of feeling.

I felt the same way upon finishing Martin’s novel. I have never understood women as well as I do now after reading her work and have never loved women as much. What a marvelous creation they are! What wondrous brains and hearts and souls they have!

Thank you, Robin. This is every bit as good as Dr. Selzer’s book and it’s every bit the revelation of the open, totally honest heart of a human being as anything Walt Whitman ever revealed. This is true and it is intelligent and it is the kind of thing I think of when I think of poetry and literature.

I am in awe and I thank you.

[PinkAmy loves books, cats and naps · Rating 2 out of 5]

THE HIDING PLACE GIRL started off with the unique and somewhat comical voice of ten year old Renae, narrating. I wasn't bothered, at first by the incessant telling and lack if showing, until page after page turned into chapter after chapter of often boring details of each year of Renae's life.
When I reached part two, I thought finally, finally something is going to happen. Wrong. I continued reading, hoping for a payoff, I admit to skipping some pages, trying to find the interesting part.
Whenever I see so a number of 5 star ratings for a book recently released, I wonder if these are friends and family of the writer.
I think this writer has potential. Much of the beginning of the book truly captured the perspective of a bright, curious ten year old. If she had better bets readers to tell her when the book drags, she could potentially write a great book.

[Stacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One hell of a read. This one felt almost a little too close, like a palm reader reading the lines in my hand and seeing through the skin. That's how close it was.

And there were so many layers. Her relationship with her father, and the relationship with her mother, the classic suburban woman too caught up in what the neighbors think. The way her family struggled behind closed doors (and sometimes not). The way Renae tried to get away and yet still remained close. Her relationships with men, and how they played out certain patterns. Great read.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Martin's prose creeps up on you like a honey coated mallet, lulling you closer, lulling you closer, until — BAM — it hits you smack between the eyeballs with the truth.

The author works a similarly deft trick with the plot, showing how a young girl's relationship with her troubled father loads the open fields of her future with buried incendiaries.

It's gutsy stuff — a blur of mood and attitude tie-dyed onto a 70s canvas. Highly recommended.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't put this book down. It was so realistic and showed so much emotion. I was able to relate to a lot of what happened in the book and the feeling Renae portrays for every situation she is faced with in her life. Great book.

[Thomas Holbrook · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the encapsulation of this book as I began to write the review. The copyright page was limited to the title, author, copyright and ISBN – almost as if this book only existed on the devise upon which it was read. Throughout its reading, I had the feeling I get when I see the shadow of a cloud pass over a meadow or feeling a quickly passing cooling current found in a summer-warmed lake – searching for its return until coming to believe it never really existed, its vagueness becoming an important character of the tale. This ethereal quality of this lengthy novel seems random until the randomness is given definition as the story ends. The reader who labors through the shadows of reading this book will be rewarded with sunshine at its book’s end.
Renae Hayes, a girl from an unnamed, but well described city (those familiar with Louisville, Kentucky, could likely know the neighborhoods in which she lives, if not some of her precise addresses) who grew up in a home with a raging father and a weak mother who would offer no shelter to her children from his abusive. From the trauma she experienced at home and in the Catholic primary school she attended, she learned to survive by locating various hiding places where she could experience some level of safety. When she was young, those places were physical locations, as she grew older, those localities became less physical and more a search for connection. 575 of the 621 pages are filled with the “travels” of Renae as she seeks a place to belong. Such a locale eludes her, though she ties her heart to a lot of seemingly permanent pillars that are proven to be made more of wish than substance. Each time her connection is found to be empty, her search continues on its rambling, undirected path.
When the source of Renae’s pain is found to be less powerful than she imagined, she begins to gain purchase in climbing the mountain of sand upon which she has been running all of her life. She then finds the strength move from hiding to allowing herself to know her truth and to let others know who she is as well. This moment of clarity occurs in a scared place, a place where she had once sought safety but found only confusion. As she forgives those who harmed her, she finds the strength to likewise forgive herself for the crimes committed only in her mind against herself.
The book is painfully slow at moments. It is excruciating to read of someone, even a fictionalized character, continuing to make the same mistakes and expecting different results and Renae does this for most of the book. Ms. Martin, according the biographical information at the end of the book, has studied Clinical Psychology and that knowledge is evident in the accuracy with which she creates Renae’s worldview. (I hope that knowledge is from a book and not from personal experience.) Her repetitive poor choices, the aimlessness with which she approaches life and her “hope for something better” while doing nothing to move in that direction creates within the reader, it seems, emotions very much like those Renae is experiencing.
At present the book is available only in ebook format. Maybe it will be in book form, possibly made into a movie. Louisville’s Jennifer Lawrence would make a perfect Renae.

[Theresa Morris · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I started reading this book, it had a vagueness that I hoped would come to an end at some point through the story. It did not. I was interested to find out what Renae would encounter through her life, but I was disappointed in the finale. The story was intriguing enough to keep me reading, but I don't know that I would promote or recommend this book to friends. The writing was good, but not great and the story, in the end, was not what I expected.

[Sherille Sheffield · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took a bit to find the pace of this book, but then it brought in a lot o f childhood memories. I haven't thought about those things in a long time. I like a book that can take you with it and explore without judgment.

Growing up in any family, there can be difficult times and circumstances to lead you on the right or wrong path. Sometimes, you don't have enough information to make the choice a head of you.

[Anita Heveron · Rating 4 out of 5]

"When I was hurting, I got down in there with it and walked around it, and saw it, and touched it, and loved on it."

This quote sums up this lovely but difficult book. The author beautifully captures the pain of being a female adolescent, the pain/love of assault, growing up in a world where you played outside all day & wandered from house to house in the summer.

I stopped many times to re-read paragraphs where her imagery was so painful it was beautiful

[Susan Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a free offering from Amazon so I tried it. It was disturbing, but well written which helped to transmit the unease I felt. The story involves typical dysfunctional family dynamics, characters and town without any real surprises - I think the timing of my read added to the disturbance I feel.

[Debbie Kardys marchand · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a BORING book. The only reason I kept reading was because I was waiting to see what her secrets were. Apparently her secret is that she lived a boring life that lacked any kind of excitement. I honestly don't know how this book got 5 stars

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This author shows promise. The portions dealing with Renae's childhood were often compelling. However, the second half of the book meandered here and there and ultimately seemed pretty pointless.

I would read another by this author. I think she has a good one within her!

[Mary · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible book, not written well at all. I never really figured out what the point of this book was. Jumbled up mess!

[Terri Pye · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wish I understood the point.

[Jennifer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Slow. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen...nothing. I fell asleep every time I started to read.

[Dana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ehhh. It had a good narrative thing going, but it just never went anywhere. So many places it could have gone, too.

[Antoinette Bolduc]

This book was so bad for me, I couldn't finish it.

[Mawdi · Rating 2 out of 5]

an ok read..

[Laura Kivi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book...
It was a bit slower than I usually like, however I did find this book intriguing

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I kept waiting for something to happen. And waiting. And waiting. All the way to the end.