Imagine that you’re a teenage girl
attending high school and had discovered a chat room on the Internet. Now,
imagine that you have connected with a man from another country, you two have
been secretly talking to each other for a year, and have fallen in love without
your parents’ knowledge. Finally, what would happen if your parents found out
that you were planning to leave the country, to be with the man who you met on
the Internet. The down side, they only had twenty-five days to make you stay! Which is what Almost Gone, is about, written by father and daughter duo, John
Baldwin and Mackenzie Baldwin.
Mackenzie Baldwin
was a teenage girl who lived in Plano, Texas. She was raised in a
loving Christian family, with her two younger brothers, mother, and father. When Mackenzie
Baldwin was a junior at Plano West Senior High, she was visiting a friend. During her visit, Mackenzie’s friend
introduced her to an online chat room, which allowed people to connect with
random people around the world. Mackenzie started chatting with a man named
Aadam, who lived in Kosovo, which is a country part of the European area. After
talking to each other online, Mackenzie and Aadam were talking on Skype,
sending love letters, and calling/texting. But to make matters worse, Aadam was
a Muslim who was very religious in the Islam religion, he started to persuade
Mackenzie to become a Muslim so they could get married, since he is not allowed
to marry a woman whose not a Muslim. So, Mackenzie started to convert from
Christianity to Islamic. In the book, Mackenzie does describe her journey of
converting to a different religion, from studying the Koran, watching Islamic
videos on YouTube, and attending a mosque! The down side for Mackenzie while
she was talking to Aadam was she became very distant to her family and high
school friends because she was Islamic and they were not. Her father, John
Baldwin, along with her mother, tried to persuade Mackenzie that she should
stay away from Islam, without knowing the fact that their daughter attended a
mosque along with having a second family so she could be “raised” in an Islamic
home.
By
the time Mackenzie was a senior at Plano West Senior High, her only friend was
Aadam. Mackenzie was dead set on meeting him in person, but when they planned
to meet somewhere, either in another country or America, their plans seemed to
slip through the cracks. When Mackenzie was eighteen and almost getting ready
to graduate from high school, she and Aadam were planning on getting married .
. .that is until her friends’ parents spilled the beans.
For
one year, Mackenzie was secretly talking to Aadam behind her parents back!
After Mackenzie saved up money from her job, she made flight arrangements to go
to Kosovo shortly after she graduated from high school. That is until
Mackenzie’s father, John Baldwin, got a phone call from a parent who he knew
from West Plano Senior High. The parent told John that Mackenzie announced to
some of her classmates that she was planning on leaving the country. The total
of days that Mackenzie’s parents had to convince their daughter from doing this
horrible mistake was twenty-five days! When researching about Kosovo, John
Baldwin found out that Kosovo had a high percentage rate of Teen Sex Trafficking!
Soon after, John Baldwin had the FBI take part of Mackenzie’s plan because
Mackenzie broke the law. How? She submitted paper work to the Passport Agency
to get another passport, even though she knew where her parents hid her
original passport. As federal punishment, Mackenzie could spend five years in
state prison for a crime of having two valid passports! Thankfully, the FBI
didn’t want to press charges. Finally, after weeks of persuading his daughter
to not go to Kosovo, Mackenzie figured out what a terrible choice she had made
and how she learned from making terrible choices.
In
concluding, Almost Gone was a great
book to read because it is a story that could teach parents and teens the
dangers of interacting with strangers online. Mackenzie and John Baldwin tell
their side of the story about the events that occurred leading up to that
fateful plan of Mackenzie leaving the country to be with a man who she only met
with online. Once Mackenzie’s parents learned about her plan to escape the
county to go to Kosovo to get married, her parents only had twenty-five days to
intervene!
Trivia Questions:
1) Why did Aadam wanted to marry Mackenzie?
2) True or False: Aadam tried to contact John Baldwin through Facebook to convince him that he loved Mackenzie.
3) Why did Mackenzie send one of her old Smartphones to Aadam?
Baldwin, John, and Mackenzie Baldwin. Almost Gone: Twenty-Five Days And One Chance To Save Our Daughter. New York: Howard Books, 2017. Print.
Baldwin, John, and Mackenzie Baldwin. Almost Gone: Twenty-Five Days And One Chance To Save Our Daughter. New York: Howard Books, 2017. Print.
