Though the novel is titled Finding Jake, with the title character being a high school senior who is missing after a high school shooting, the story truly centers around the internal workings of Jake’s father, Simon. Cautious and introverted by nature, Simon forged a new life path when he hesitantly agreed to become a stay-at-home parent upon the birth of their first child, while his wife retained her professional career as a lawyer. All these years later, when the school shooting occurs and the police immediately suspect missing Jake as being involved, and quite possibly a second shooter, Simon’s tendency to overanalyze his parenting choices goes into hyperdrive as he tries to contemplate all possibilities. Bryan Reardon pens a dark and intense novel that sits firmly in our modern age of parenting.
Simon replays scenes from Jake’s childhood, each adding to the theme that Jake has always been a little shy and slightly removed from the larger group of similarly aged children in his upper-middle class suburban neighborhood. Unlike his younger sister who has been drawn to social experiences since she was a toddler, Jake has most often preferred playing at home or even in solitude, with only one or two close friends in his social circle. As Simon returns to moments throughout Jake’s life, his parental guilt builds, and he can’t stop himself from contemplating the possibility that Jake was indeed involved, and that his choices as Jake’s primary caregiver led him to that place.
A classmate is quickly identified as a shooter, but he died of a self-inflicted gunshot at the school while Jake remains missing. The shooter’s relationship with Jake is revealed in pieces through Simon’s flashbacks, giving different impressions at different points, while always remaining suspicious to Simon. The pressure of the police investigation and the reactions of the world, and especially their own immediate community, as a result of the nonstop press coverage begin to crack the already tenuous relationship between Simon and his wife Rachel. She steadfastly believes in Jake’s innocence and insists that Simon simply must find Jake and all will be resolved.
My heart raced through this whole novel, and not just out of the sheer worry for the title character, but out of empathy for the father who couldn’t help but question every parenting decision he’d ever made. This novel encompassed the fear that so many of us parents feel– the enormity of our children’s fates that can so often be directly related to our parenting styles or choices, rightfully so or not. The use of flashbacks felt perfect, because as parents, we so often replay scenes from our children’s lives for good and bad, so it felt natural for Jake’s dad to do the same within the construct of the novel’s storytelling. This heart-wrenching novel felt true and modern, sadly so.