She’s realistic enough to know that a bass guitarist who disappeared fourteen years ago is not going to be an easy man to find, so, given the lack of actual clues, she decides to create a father herself. She dives into the music scene with her ‘instant best friend’ Lottie, and using Frankenstein’s monster as an example, she takes an ear from one guitarist and a nose from another, slowly building up a fantasy picture of the father she has never known. At the same time, through careful questioning and casual remarks from her grandparents and her former stepdad Wieger, Kiek discovers that the unknown bass guitarist may not be quite as unknown as her mother has always led her to believe.

Kiek is a story, both hilarious and bittersweet, about a girl who goes in search of her roots. Jongman tells her tale in a lively style, constantly going off at a tangent and casually jumping backwards and forwards between the present and the past, in the matter- of-fact prose of a teenage girl. Now and then, there’s a little romance (‘Why could I feel that tingle? I really didn’t like him at all. All I needed was his nose and two of his personality traits and he could keep the rest.’), but it never takes over. The central theme remains Kiek’s search for her father. The fact that she actually finds him may come as a bit of a surprise in a story by a writer who has such a down-to-earth and realistic style.

But Jongman does not fall into the trap of the happy ending; Kiek’s father is no dream dad. Jongman has created an ending that is worthy of Kiek.