Michelle Turner is returning to the Montana town to donate a kidney to her dying movie star father, Gavin Slade, who she hasn't seen or heard from in seventeen years. In intervening years she has made a life for herself as a successful graphic designer. In doing so she has stifled her creative drive to paint, but considers it a worthwhile exchange in order to raise her son Cody as a single, unwed mother. She hopes that she will finally be able to form a relationship with the man who was the epitome of the absentee parent.

However, she almost immediately comes face-to face with Cody's father, Sam McPhee, the man she is convinced deserted her, but whom she has never completely gotten over. Sam is shocked to discover he has a teen-aged son, and one with a serious attitude problem. Yet he too has had lingering fantasies about the girl he had to leave in the middle of the night, courtesy of his mother's alcoholism and Gavin's determination to keep them apart.

Sam becomes determined to win back Michelle's heart as well as to gain the trust of his son-despite the resistance from both. He has an upwards climb to do so, especially when his mother's addiction surfaces again.

In The You I Never Knew, Susan Wiggs revisits some issues on which she has proven herself to be incredibly insightful. Her powerful descriptions of the inner turmoil felt by parents forced in one way or another to have relinquished their children, and those of the ones who have been reunited either accidentally or purposefully will always stand testimony to her understanding of them. Likewise, her sensitivity for the emotional upheavals felt by teens in general is phenomenal.

However, I have to say that in this particular book I believe she is off the mark in her portrayal of Sam's mother as a recovering alcoholic supposedly five years sober in AA. Although it is obvious she is just an inch away from a prodigious bender, it seems unlikely that she would have lasted more than six or nine months in the fragile state she is in. Her desire to "call her sponsor" and yet make no apparent effort to do so indicates no commitment, and the fact that she is released immediately upon drying out fails to acknowledge the near impossibility of a drunk like her staying clean when the next difficulty arises in her life.

This stands out so clearly only because it is truly the only time that this reader has come across a situation of any sort, be it life-threatening, emotionally distressing or likewise joy-filled and triumphant which Miss Wiggs has not nailed directly on target. Her ability to get inside the heads of her characters, male, female, old and young is so outstanding that as with all of her others The You I Never Knew comes highly recommended. Five Angels, RR

Reviewed by: Lynn