The Most Wanted
By
Jacquelyn Mitchard
Too many people fall in love for various reasons. Some fall for the wrong reason while some fall in love to prove a point that will best suit their purposes. Others get their acts right and fall in love for all the good reasons that would benefit their offspring and relatives and the society in general.
In this masterful piece by the author of “The Deep End of the Ocean”, we are made to see the world of a young girl, a teenager for that matter who lacks love and warmth from her biological mother. There is no father figure in her life and so; she yearns for the love of a man in a family she is born into and being brought up by a single parent who uses her as a mere domestic servant.
The Most Wanted is mostly the story of Arley Mowbray LeGrande – a fourteen year-old girl born out of wedlock by a mother who begot her when she was fourteen. The story also has the passion that invokes the vulnerability teenage girls even the most sensible of them face when they recklessly fall in love with the wrong person for all the right reasons. Arley needed love badly that even when it came from a handsome felon; she was head in heels over in love.
Arley is young, smart, and intelligent in school and in sports but she is lonely. As a result of the neglect from her indifferent nurse-mother, she strikes up a correspondence with a prison inmate Dillon LeGrande who under the spell of his poetic, seductive letters, falls helplessly in love.
Dillon is the eldest of four sons of a mother who is once widowed by a refinery explosion and seemed to have raised himself in a little town of Welfare – one of those single-tavern burgs on the ragged hem of San Antonio’s outskirts. Dillon’s brothers are such roughneck punks who found themselves in and out of foster care and baby jail for the usual drinking-fighting-truancy stuff all of which Dillon tried to stay away of until the night he and his brother Kevin decided to take a friend and his handgun and held up a gas station in Comfort, a few miles north of their home. In the ensuing milieu, the hapless kid working the cash register ended up with his left arm shattered by a gunshot wound. This earned Dillon eight years inside the Solamente River Prison.
Through Connie her friend Elena’s sister, she got to know of her correspondence with Kevin – Dillon’s younger brother who is also at Solamente River Prison. From here, a burning desire to fill her life with some romantic illusions enveloped her entire being. She needed to put some colour into her dull life at home where there is no love from anybody for her. Dillon being twice her age and she being fourteen, they started exchanging poems and letters from September. She visited him once and they both fell in love with one another. Dillon took advantage of her inexperience and proposed marriage to her and she accepted. When the warden disallowed her paying her husband conjugal visits, the character Annie comes into the picture.
Annie is a lawyer who is into helping youngsters have a voice of their own. Against all odds, Annie got Arley a night with her husband. Arley was once again deceived into having an unprotected sex after having had two rounds of sex and ended up becoming pregnant at a tender age. The marriage lasted only for two weeks. When Dillon broke out of the prison and went on a robbing and killing spree, the police and FBI have him on their most wanted list. Annie took it upon herself to protect Arley and her baby Desiree from Dillon.
In the end, Langtry, Arley’s elder sister it was who shot and killed Dillon her former lover out of jealousy when they started a fire to distract the attention of the police guarding Arley and her baby so he could steal the baby Desiree from her. In the ensuing madness, Arley discovered who her biological father is.
The love story of Annie and her longtime live-in-lover Stuart is told as not standing the test of time as against the one between her and Charley which lasted a short while and culminated into marriage and a pregnancy - such things Stuart couldn’t accept to offer her in her middle age.
Of course Arley learnt her lessons the hard way and braved the mounting odds of the demands of motherhood to gain entrance into the university on scholarship as she lives with the responsibilities of single girl-parent with a promise to teach her daughter something different from all she was not taught by her mother who never cared.