I got a book from my grandmother a few months ago, about a lady whose kid was stolen from her arms in Mexico, so she devoted her life to searching for missing kids / people. It’s all very predictable, in that you know basically what will happen and who the heartbroken lady will end up with within the first 30 pages. The rest is an exercise in drama!, with doses of mildly effective misdirection and a few helpings of romance novel porn to keep the attention. The story isn’t too bad, but unfortunately changes focus completely right at the end, wrapping up the mystery as neatly as a bow with too much haste and getting on to the emotional consequences.

The one thing I really don’t understand is the title, Cry No More, which seems to have no dramatic or particularly thematic connection with the rest of the story. (Well, okay, it might have a thematic connection with the last 30 pages or so, but since that part has no connection with what came before it, it’s hard for me to count that.)

So, it sat on my reading shelf for a while, as I plowed through a doorstop and a Pratchett and a I’d-verify-what-else-but-I’m-typing-this-in-notepad-due-to-no-real-internet-from-here. I’d planned to snag it after the first Pratchett, but I got in a hurry packing to get out of town early a few weekends ago, what with said grandmother being in the hospital, so I forgot it and ended up reading more Pratchett, as that was what was in the trunk. Which sucked, because she asked me if I had yet, and I had to sound like I was making up some lame excuse to placate her.

It’s funny, the things we feel guilty about. For not knowing she had died until the nurses came, even though I was holding her hand. Whether I read a book at request, or at least finished it in time to talk to her about it. And I genuinely wish I could, too, not just for the rose-tinted, shiny vision of some earnest conversation that would have made her happy. I really am curious what she wanted me to get out of it. I’m sure it wasn’t the porn, but I’m sure of little else. (I’m seriously here. There was a substantial amount of explicit hardening and penetrating going on. Very strange, even from a lady who thought Grand Theft Auto 3 was the funniest game she’d ever seen.) Now I won’t really ever know for sure, and that sucks.

I guess it’s strange that my symbol of loss for my grandmother, the one thing that I know I won’t ever know now, but I could have known if I’d tried harder, is about a book we both read. I’m glad that’s what it is, though, too, because it will remind me that we were closer in very fundamental ways than I would usually describe us as being. And that’s comforting to me.