Aidan's Quest Synopsis

AIDAN is a highly intelligent 9 year old who is on a quest to find the identity of his father but his mother continually resists. His mother, MARGO, is a 29 year old single mother. She got pregnant in college by SAM, who had a bipolar episode while she was pregnant and told her to put the baby up for adoption and refused to be part of the pregnancy. But there’s more to it. Before she learns she is pregnant, Margo goes home to where her alcoholic father and mother live, leaves the car with the keys in it (Sam’s car) to get something from the house. Her father comes home and she manages to get back to the car unnoticed but it was moved. At the same hour, and elderly couple, ALFRED WADE and his wife Mildred. They also return home from the Lodge and Mildred is hit by a car, sustaining life threatening injuries and she later dies. Mr. Wade is a long time friend of the families and thinks of Margo as a granddaughter but he assumes the driver was Sam because he knew it was Sam’s car.

But, Sam wasn’t there. Who drove the car? Margo’s father, angry because he thought his daughter and Sam were up in her room making out. He arrived home drunk, got in the car to look for the person he thought he saw running around the corner, hit Ms. Wade, got scared and parked the car around the corner behind his house to make it look as if someone abandoned it.. It was really Margo and her friend trying to get out of the house before her parents learned she was there.

Sam believes Margo did the hit and run. His love for her dwindles and he quits on the relationship but doesn’t talk to her about his suspicions. He does ask Margo to keep his identity as the father a secret so his child, and the neighborhood, won’t know that his father was mentally ill and accused of murder. He thinks that she placed the child for adoption and has no further contact with her. She moves in with an aunt in another city and loses contact with him. She tries later to contact him but is unable to find him. She did not know that Sam was accused, using Mr. Wade’s testimony, but dies before the hearing, when he accidentally (or purposefully) drinks alcohol while taking anti-depressants and dies in his sleep.

Ten years later, Margo is working a social worker. She kept her promise to keep Sam’s identity a secret. She did not, however, place her child for adoption. Mr. Wade learns about Sam’s death and finds out afterward that Sam was not in the neighborhood. He blames himself for falsely accusing Sam and assumes the position of protector to Margo. He helps pay for her to finish her college degree and then brings her to work in an upscale retirement community he designed (he was an engineer and contractor in the Army and then as a civilian. His company purchased some land and many buildings and homes in a privatized Army Post in a city a few hours from the home town where Margo was raised and he lived with his wife before her death.

Aidan’s Quest is primarily set in this retirement village where Mr. Wade has rented out, to Margo and Aidan, half of the duplex he bought for himself. Workers have the option of living in barracks and apartments on the premises of the retirement village to be closer to their work. Margo works for the company that runs the nursing home and assisted living services but many of the homes are actually owned by those in their 60’s who are investing in property in a neighborhood where they can either work or volunteer at the nursing home/rehabilitation center or in the running of the community itself.

The book begins with Mr. Wade’s offer to watch Aidan during the summer he turns ten and is no longer able to attend the employee’s daycare center. Aidan is bullied and is awkward with other children but his intelligence makes him a conversational equal with many of the adults in the complex. Aidan was receiving therapy and going through educational testing to rule out Asperger’s Syndrome, and his mother is dealing with being too protective while also continuing to keep the secret of his father’s identity.

This is the summer that Aidan meets WILL, the grandson of a resident of the nursing home. He is a private detective who is starting a business where he tracks down relatives and genealogical information which he uses, along with detailed interviewing of the elderly person and family members to write a “story of a life” for those he is hired to interview. He enlists Aidan to help him during that summer with recording equipment. This leads to several plot twists. Mr. Wade secretly hires him to research Sam’s whereabouts so that he can keep a lid on the fact that he was the one who originally incriminated Sam. He is trying to keep Margo from finding out about his secret. Margo hires Will to find out about MS. RISEMAN, a mysterious foreign born elderly woman with a thick Yiddish accent, but who Margo learns has little to no accent when she overhears a phone call. Mr. Wade has taken Aidan to visit her several times and she appears to Margo to have more interest in her son than she is comfortable with.

If this isn’t enough deception for Will to be working with two closely associated people on two different jobs, Will is asked by a third person, Aidan, to help him find his father. Will does not realize Sam is his father as Mr. Wade only gave him a name to investigate and Margo did not give Aidan Sam’s last name. Margo starts having feelings for Will and resists them, being weary of a relationship after the disastrous one that produced her son. Will continues to pursue Margo and Aidan even pressures his mother for a “father” if she refused to give him his own birth father’s information.

The twist comes when Will learns the truth about Margo’s father hitting Mr. Wade’s wife in the car, the fact that Ms. Riseman’s mortgage at the retirement center cottages, as well as her brief stay at the cardiac rehab unit of the nursing home where we first meet Ms. Riseman, and the seed money for Will’s new business were all funded by Mr. Wade, having built up a huge capital due to his early investment in the burgeoning retirement community at the old Army post. He has managed to engineer more than just the buildings. He has manipulated Margo’s life in order to both hide his secret and protect her from what he feels would be harmful for her. To make matters worse, Ms. Riseman is blackmailing Mr. Wade for more money to keep her from revealing that she is actually Sam’s grandmother, allowed too move to the retirement village as a bribe to keep her from telling Margo that picked Sam as the person driving the car ten years before. Will is conflicted about whether or not to tell Margo what he knows as he has professional responsibilities about confidentiality.

Will figures out a way to get the information to Margo without implicating himself but it backfires. Aidan finds the research papers he has copied with all the information he has learned and runs to Ms. Riseman’s home to ask her about his father. Margo learns he has run and rallies the troops, the residents who know Aidan and Mr. Wade to help find him. In light if the possible abduction of Aidan, Will convinces Mr. Wade that they both need to tell Margo and the police what they know, even at the risk of Margo being mad at them. She is hurt and furious at both of them for manipulating her and blames them on the Aidan running away. They all read through the research to find clues to where he could be. The only resident who knows a great deal about Aidan but who was not in the search party was Ms. Riseman. They storm her house and find that Aidan is sitting there in her living room looking at pictures of his father and having cookies and tea.

Angry with them all, Margo takes her son home and packs her bags. She was taking somewhere else where she could make her own choices without interference from Mr. Wade or anyone else. All this time, she thought everything had be the way it was supposed to be. Finding out Mr. Wade had engineered Will’s appearance to investigate but also to court her invalidated his feelings for her. It was now Will’s job to show her that he fell in love with her on his own volition but also to point out that she was doing the same thing to Aidan that she resisted being done to her by Mr. Wade.

At the same time, Mr. Wade had to realize that he was pressuring Margo to stop keeping secrets from Aidan when he was withholding layers of information from Margo. Each had to deal with their own fears of rejection and strive for independence. Ironically, this summer of working with Will, learning better social skills by talking to the elderly people and watching countless interviews, ended up causing the previous diagnosis of Asperger’s to be revised by his therapist. It was fine line between being highly intelligent and socially awkward and having a diagnosis of Asperger’s. While he still fit a good number of characteristics of this disorder, the social skill problems improved enough that it was no longer a barrier to Aidan being a “normal” boy. Aidan understood he would always be a little quirky but if he focused on making friends who liked what he did and if he continued to work on listening more and talking less, he could make friends and avoid most of the bullying that once plagued him.

Most importantly, Aidan learns that a family is made up of much more than blood relationships and a father is more than a person who gets a mother pregnant. Yes, he learned the name of his birth father, but once his mother forgave Mr. Wade and Will, he gained a new father and found he had more grandparents than he could possibly have imagined at the beginning of the summer, including the old Jewish woman with the fake accent, which he learned was only used to help her make friends at the retirement village because she though no one would like her if she didn’t have something interesting about herself to present. The bribery of Mr. Wade, that was only because she wanted to get to know her grandson and didn’t have the money to move in without Mr. Wade’s help.

This novel explores several concepts that are important to teens and young adults such as the concept of independence from well-meaning adults that refuse to let go, the identity of family members absent in their lives, and the search for their own identities. It is also a cautionary tale about keeping secrets from loved ones, who have a right to know about their own lives.

It is also a story about a kid who isn’t the most popular or the best at sports. He’s the kid we all knew in school and wished they would not ask one more question or who everyone feared would corner us in the hall and monologue about something we had no interest in. Or he could be just like one of us, always wondering why no one wanted to play with us, why they bullied us. It’s about a kid who learned he could improve his social skills so he would blend more with his peers while not having to apologize for being intelligent and having gifts to offer.

Aidan finds that even adults use creative, and not always healthy, tactics to help themselves with social situations such as Will’s grandfather always keeping a plastic spoon in his overall bib to get people to ask him why he does this as a conversation starter or Ms. Riseman’s strong Yiddish accent to add mystery to her in the eyes of her peers so they will like her and ask her questions. Mr. Wade uses his money and persuasive powers to make friends because he doesn’t trust that they will like him as he is and Margo avoids dicey relationships completely or becomes just what others expect of her order to please them because she fears rejection after growing up in an alcoholic home and being rejected by Sam.

Finally, it is a story that could be enjoyed by young and old, and parents of children with Asperger’s or just highly intelligent and quirky. While it is listed as a young adult novel, it will appeal to a wide range of ages because it deals with basic human nature, mistakes we all make, and how we can learn ways to correct our mistakes, be who we are without apology, and be honest with those we love.
2207 wds