A mother finds new strength in order to find her abducted children in this memoir. As a young girl, when Baker Guy thought about her future, she, like many other women who grew up in the 1950s, believed that "a man was the most important thing in a woman's life" and had faith in the "whole fairytale" of romance and marriage. When, as a freshman in college, she met Klaus, a dashing German graduate student, he initially seemed like her dream man. During their courtship, she chose to ignore serious warning signs, including Klaus' intolerance of racial diversity, and they eventually married and had two children. By the time the kids reached the ages of 4 and 2, the marriage collapsed and a nightmare began. In this memoir, Baker Guy tells of the harrowing "four months...seventeen weeks...119 days...2,856 hours" she spent searching for her children, whom her ex-husband kidnapped in 1977. Chapters alternate between the events surrounding the abduction and flashbacks to the beginning of her turbulent relationship with Klaus. Along the way, Baker Guy explains how little recourse she had, as, at the time, "Klaus had broken no law." To her horror, the authorities considered the situation a mere "domestic dispute"; even the FBI wouldn't touch the case, because "naming a parent as kidnapper under these circumstances [was] all but unheard of in 1977." Nevertheless, she knew she'd stop at nothing until she found her children. Baker Guy writes with honest and heart-wrenching emotional detail as she describes her abusive relationship, in which their marriage bed was like "a battlefield." She also ably gets across the excruciating pain of missing her two kids: "My voice quivered as I thought of the last glimpse I'd had of Ty and Megan, smiling, excited, waving goodbye through the car windows....Had I told them I loved them?" Overall, this remembrance is not only a gripping account of these terrifying events, but also an effective chronicle of legal hurdles women faced during the latter half of the 20th century. A moving account of a nightmarish family drama.
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