June Bug by Chris Fabry caught my eye both because I have enjoyed others of his books, plus this one was said to be based on Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, one of my top two all-time favorite novels.

It begins with 9 year old June traveling around the country with her father,  John Johnson, in an old RV. It’s the only life she has ever known. They home school (or RV school, as they like to joke) and have seen much of the country. But one day a part in the RV breaks down, and they park in a Wal-mart parking lot waiting for it to come in. When June goes into the store one day, she sees her picture on a bulletin board of missing children. It says she is Natalie Edwards and she has been missing since she was 2 from Dogwood, WV. The age progression technology forms a pretty accurate representation, and a birthmark is a key identifying factor. June doesn’t tell her father, or supposed father, this right away, though. He’s been a good dad, though quiet and not wanting to stay in one place for long.

Meanwhile, back in Dogwood, Mae Edwards is the only one who believes her granddaughter is still alive. Her daughter, Dana, said her car was abducted with the baby still in it, and neither was ever seen again. Until now: someone has discovered an old car in the lake, and Sheriff Hadley Preston presides as it is extricated from the lake. When he investigates, he finds it is the missing car, but there is no child’s body in it, and the strap on the car seat has been cut.

The story started out a little slowly for me, but picked up in the latter half as all the pieces started coming together.

Also, at first, I was expecting it to be more of a parallel to Les Mis than it was based on some of the blurbs I had seen about it. I know remakes or retellings of favorite stories never match point for point, but once I stopped trying to compare and contrast it to Les Mis and just enjoyed it for the story itself, I got a lot more out of it plus enjoyed the throwbacks to it I did see.

Probably the most disappointing comparison was with the mother of the girl. In Les Mis, Fantine was something of a tragic victim. She made some wrong choices, but she was taken advantage of first by the man who got her pregnant, then the couple who were taking care of her child and inventing stories about her needs to get more money out of her, then she ran into hard luck when she was fired after it was discovered she had a child out of wedlock. Desperate to get the money she thought her child needed, she sold everything she had, including her hair and teeth, and finally ended up in prostitution. I read somewhere that author Victor Hugo considered prostitution was a form of slavery. When her path crossed Valjean’s and he realized that being fired from his factory had contributed to her situation, he helped her and took care of her child when she died, and the grace shown between the two is one of the best parts of the story. However, the mother in June Bug, Dana, comes across as just a bad, selfish person. I guess you could say she is a victim of her addictions, and we’ve had extended family members in the same boat and know what drugs can do to a person’s perspective. But there’s nothing about Dana that makes the reader sympathetic to her.

The most exciting surprise, though, was in the character who turned out to be Johnson’s benefactor, the part taken in Les Mis by the bishop who shows Valjean a kindness that changes his life and helps him both spiritually and practically. I don’t want to spoil it, so I won’t say more about it, but it totally caught me by surprise and I was delighted by how that played out.

As a story on its own merits, I ended up liking it and enjoying it much more near the end than I did at the beginning. Fabry’s characters are well drawn, and I liked the journey they went through.

Looking around Chris Fabry’s blog a little bit for more information on June Bug, I found this fun entry on How to Get Your Book Mentioned on Jeopardy, which tells some of the background and progression of writing the book and how it really did end up being a clue of Jeopardy.

Genre: Christian fiction
My rating: 8 out of 10

(Sharing with Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books and Carole’s Books You Loved)

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