In her novel The Empty Place, Olivia Cole explores the themes of identity, truth, family dynamics, and self-discovery. To do this, Cole creates her protagonist Henrietta Lightfoot. Henry is an indoor girl, an earthworm whose father, Joseph, is a butterfly—always fluttering off to some new adventure. To Joseph, adventure is outdoors, where one can wander and discover new places. He shares these places with his YouTube followers who tag along with him on his adventures when his own daughter will not. Instead, Henry prefers the safety of home, “her cluttered desk, dotted with dried hot glue” (44), and the familiarity of her friend Ibtihay Umar with whom she creates collages from junkyard finds.
On Henry’s eleventh birthday, her father gets lost hiking in the forests of Quinvandel. Now, a year later, he comes wandering out, although it appears he has left his mind behind. In one of his more lucid moments, he gives Henry a pendant, telling her he was lost but found his way back home to give her this gift: “My greatest discovery is my gift to you” (32).
Confused not only by the gift, since she doesn’t like jewelry, but also by her father’s extended absence, Henry wonders where her father has been for so long and why he did not return home sooner. Because she believes she will find answers by retracing her father’s steps, Henry enters Quinvandel with her father’s map and begins to follow a well-trodden path. Convinced that she can find a piece of herself that resembles her father’s pioneering and adventuring spirit, Henry keeps searching. At one point along the way, she falls into some kind of sink hole and finds herself lost in an alternate universe which Cole calls This Place.
In This Place, Henry meets a variety of people, all lost. Among them, she befriends Wolfson, the human son of wolves, and Ndidi from Nigeria. Together, the three begin to search for answers in This Place that defies logic. When Henry eats the makab berry, she can understand and communicate with wolves and donkeys and those who speak another language.
As the story unfolds, readers will wonder along with Henry, Ndidi, and Wolfson what motivates people to behave as they do—abandoning certain responsibilities or making choices in favor of others. We are also reminded that some truths are hard to say while others are hard to accept. Furthermore, we all make choices, “and some of them only ever happen in our minds” (170). Ultimately, Henry realizes that only she can fill the empty place within herself and that she has to follow her own path rather than conform to a version of herself that her father desires.
- Donna