One Speck of Truth by Caela Carter (review)

Alma’s secretive mother and grandparents won’t tell Alma anything about her father beyond the fact that he died, so she’s been hunting through cemeteries for his gravestone and searching for traces of him on the internet. The twelve-year-old is thrown when her mother, in typical clandestine fashion, up and moves the two of them to Portugal; there she’s astonished to meet relatives she never knew she had, and she’s stunned to discover that the father she’s mourned for years is alive and well and living in Lisbon. Meeting him, however, doesn’t fulfill her dreams as she’d hoped, and she still has to unpack a lot of family secrets—and even the practice of secrecy itself. We’ve seen the “claiming an absent parent is dead” trope before, but Carter looks beyond its superficial convenience to explore what kind of family dysfunction spawns such a deception (it’s eventually clear to Alma that her mother is following in her own mother’s evasive footsteps). The book is laceratingly clear about the painful isolation of living with a mother whose every decision—to end a marriage with Alma’s beloved stepfather, to sell the furniture, to move—is withheld from her daughter. Alma’s relationship with her best friend, Julia, adds dimension to her character: she loves and depends on Julia but fails to see Julia’s similar struggles with her own origin and identity. Ultimately, this is a touching story about the importance of understanding as well as having family, and readers will appreciate Alma’s hard-won new knowledge and peace.