Robin Merrow MacCreadyCritiques

When Kendra spots her father at an outdoor concert with a woman not her mom, she can't believe it, but after calling him and seeing him answer, she's knocked completely off kilter. He says he's in Boston at a conference, but she knows that's a lie. It forces her to question her idyllic family life and exacerbates her panic attacks that began when she nearly drowned during a storm while on a boat when she was much younger.
What ensues is her trying to deal with her confusion and hurt by hooking up with a boy and getting very drunk one night. In the harsh hungover reality of the next morning, she must confront her father as well as her mother to discover sufficient truth to stabilize her life. What she learns is nothing she could have imagined and comes with an unexpected bonus.

A stunningly real juvenile/young adult novel about a teenager struggling with her mom's alcoholism and disappearance. Her own devolving mental health and obsessive behaviors are completely realistic and expressive. The only unrealistic part of the book was the ending, which I won't spoil for you, but it seems that things would really not end up that way in the real world. Maybe the author really wanted to end on a hopeful note?
Anyway, this is recommended for youngsters struggling with an alcoholic parent, teens who want to understand what a friend in that situation is going through, and adults who'd like more insight into the mind of a teen child of an alcoholic.

Claudine wakes up and finds her mother missing. At first, she is not worried about her alcholic mother who often leaves her alone for stretches at a time and comes home after sobering up. After a few days, Claudine begins to worry. Her propensity for making lists and cleaning up become more and more serious as these rituals take over her life. Her grades drop and she distances herself from her friends as she tries to convince them that her mom has run away to rehab. Will her mother ever come home? Will Claudine cause permanent damage to herself and her relationships because of her obsessive compulsive disorder?

Cover blurb: How deep do you have to dig to bury your past?
Careful planning and constant control are Claudine's protection. Order is her weapon. She's long buried her own needs and dreams to cover for her alcoholic mom. But when Mom suddenly disappears - on another alcoholic binge? - seventeen-year-old Claudine finds herself all alone, and a much darker reality emerges from beneath years of angry denial and enabling behavior. And as the truth comes closer to the surface, Claudine must dig for the answers she's always worked so hard to cover up.

The art design for this is quite effective. The cover shows an array of post-it notes in different colours, with tasks written on them, some ordinary (call Liz, get more soda) others more unsettling (vacuum everything, eat breakfast, give rug stains another try) and a small gap where the title and a girl's eye are visible. Each chapter heading has a list of tasks, at first on torn notebook pages, then on post-its, more and more tasks each time.

I'm a bit of a sucker for kids-coping stories, whether the positive Boxcar Children style, or the darker Tillerman type. This is definitely the Tillerman end of the spectrum, though there are hints that the ending will be darker than it turns out to be.
Claude is the classic Good Kid and enabler for her mother, and the frustrated affection between them is well-portrayed, as is the slipping of her coping mechanisms as the story goes on. It didn't grip me to the extent that Homecoming or A Solitary Blue did, but it was a quick and engaging read.

Buried by Robin Merrow MacCready won the Edgar Award for Best YA in 2006, made the NYPL Best Books for Teen Age List in 2007 and won the ALA Best Books For Young Adults award in 2008.

Buried is the story of a young girl with an alcoholic mother. Throughout her life she has put aside her needs and desires to care for her mother. When her mother suddenly disappears she is forced to deal with her true feelings while trying to survive on her own.
In Buried MacCready provides readers with an in depth look into the thoughts and feelings of her main character, Claudine. Readers see the world through the young girls eyes as she struggles to maintain a good front for her friends and teachers while trying to figure out where her mother has gone. The author shows readers the dangerous world of codependency in this enlightening and suspenseful psychological thriller. I highly recommend this book for high school readers at all stages.

2007 - Best Young Adult Edgar AwardIt becomes obvious what is going on about a third of the way through, but Merrow MacCready has so deftly crafted this chilling character study that I found myself unable to put it down. She has captured Claudine's journey through the trauma of alcoholism and codependency perfectly.

Although the characters are in High School, middle school students can also relate to the issues presented in this novel. This novel deals with the realities of having an alcoholic parent who disappears at the beginning of the book. Claudine is forced to live on her own, and she attempts to bring order to her chaotic life through the use of lists and post-it notes. Claudine makes up a story about her mother being in rehab as she desperately wants her mother to get sober. Claudine writes letters to her mother as a way of telling her what she is thinking. Claudine desperately wants her mother to return, as she finds clues to the mystery of her latest disappearance. This is a depressing novel that deals with alcoholism and OCD. The author does a good job at writing teen angst and teen life that students can relate. An easy to read novel that female students will enjoy.½

This is one of my top ten favorite YA novels. It keeps you worried and guessing to the very end, and then blows you away with the secret you never saw coming. Every library that offers books for young adults should have this available.

A fine story of teenage girl left to fend for herself by self-destructive, alcoholic mother. Not my cup of tea.

Story about a girl struggling with OCD and an alcoholic mother. Very grim.½

Seventeen-year-old Claudine has a missing alocohlic mother, the need to vaccuum her floors everyday, and an eerie obsession with Post-it notes. Watch Claude as she starts off the story as a normal, worried daughter and ends up worrying her friends and teachers as she starts turning into something (or someone) else. Will you ever find out why she keeps waking up with dirt beneath her fingernails?

VOYA
Seventeen-year-old Claudine shares a trailer on the Maine coast with her alcoholic mother. Waking up to a messy house one morning, Claudine realizes that her mother has gone on another bender and disappeared, leaving her to take care of things. With the typical precision and duty of a child of an alcoholic, Claudine makes the trailer sparkling clean, helps her best friend, Liz, with her homework, and completes all obligations except those to herself. As her English teacher and the school guidance counselor notice a change in Claudine, a hurricane arrives on the coast, acting as the catalyst for the story's climax. Claudine's first-person narration successfully lets the reader experience her compulsive nature, and her inability to think clearly plays out in her heavy reliance on Post-It note reminders. Unsent letters to her mother appear at the end of each chapter and fill in the backstory of Claudine and her family, as does Claudine's regular attendance at a somewhat superficial group meeting for children of alcoholics. The novel successfully and genuinely portrays the damage caused by alcoholism without lecturing its readers. It would be useful in the classroom, and less popular with leisure readers, except for those teens who like reading about social issues.
MacCready creates a relatively realistic portrait of life, creating characters with believable flaws; nothing seems too overdramatic or fake. The use of first-person narration lets readers see the reasoning behind Claudine's actions and adds to the book. Not all readers will be able to relate directly to Claudine's situation, but others will be able to identify with many of the feelings expressed in the novel. Teens will be drawn into this emotional story and genuinely hope for Claudine to overcome her trials.
MacCready discusses codependency and denial in Buried. I enjoyed her portrayal of Claude's captive past and current coping strategies for locking away reality. The conversations between Claude and Liz illustrate the two friends' different struggles and home situations. Liz's stable home and family allow her to worry about life on a different level than Claude. Although the theme may clunk you over the head, it's only because it was buried underground for so long.
School Library Journal
Gr 8 Up-Claudine Carbonneau, a high-school senior in Deep Cove, ME, wakes up to find her alcoholic mother gone, leaving the teen to clean up their trashed home and to explain her mother's absence. As Claude attempts to carry on alone, it becomes apparent that readers aren't getting all the details of the night of the woman's disappearance, and that Claude is, in fact, an unreliable and unstable narrator. She tells her support group and her best friend, also the child of an alcoholic, that her mother has willingly checked into a rehab facility and convinces herself that this is true. She also displays increasingly advanced obsessive-compulsive tendencies as she attempts to order her life. Details of the mother-daughter relationship are revealed in awkwardly placed flashbacks, interior monologues, and letters; as a result, readers are effectively told, rather than shown, the key elements that would lead them to care about the protagonist. MacCready attempts to construct a layered, psychological mystery, building to a dramatic final scene in which truths are both literally and figuratively unearthed. Unfortunately, this first novel suffers from clumsy pacing, clich d symbolism, and a preachy message about the need for children of alcoholics to accept their parents' role in their own recovery. The "shocking" final scene is overly dramatic and unsatisfying, and Claude's "realizations" about herself and her mother are not believable.-Riva Pollard, The Winsor School Library, Boston Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.