Every girl dreams of her wedding day and the infamous father-daughter dance. What if there is someone out there, though, who isn’t “daddy’s little girl”? What if daddy was never there for father-daughter banquets while growing up? What if daddy was never there at all?

In her book, The Girl In The Orange Dress, Margot Starbuck relates the story of her life and her struggle to come to terms with deeply buried feelings of abandonment. Her adoptive parents divorced and the only daddy she had ever know moved across the country.

With both parents remarried, Margot always considered herself lucky and extra loved because she had two sets of parents; three if you included the birth parents she rarely thought of. Subsequently, her adoptive parents divorced their second spouses which ended Margot‘s contact with her stepparents. Margot never thought much of her birth parents until she became a young adult. After contacting a registry that existed to reunite birth parents with the children they gave up, Margot was able to build a relationship with her mother. She was, however, rejected by her birth father.

As she sought healing for a physical ailment, God began to work on the protective barrier that she had built around herself. As God worked on her, Margot realized the deeply suppressed feelings of abandonment caused by all of the father figures in her life and the related issues of low self esteem and unworthiness. On some levels, Margot even felt that God was not always a presence in her life. Working through Margot’s friends, ministers and contacts, God always sent an uplifting message when it was most needed.

The book reads so much like a journal or diary that, at some points, I felt as though I was intruding on Margot’s life. She descriptively writes with an ease that draws the reader into her feelings and thought processes. It is an easy read and very well written. While the book is about overcoming abandonment and finding love and acceptance from our ultimate father, God, I gleaned so much more from it. It was a journey of faith and a journey to know the true heart of God. It showed that God is ever-present, even when we think He has abandoned us. God loves us and has a plan for us, knows the number of hairs on our heads and has our names written in the palm of His hand. As Margot discovered, with a father like that, we should never feel abandoned.

The Girl In The Orange Dress: Searching For A Father Who Does Not Fail, Margot Starbuck, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove IL, 2009.

Available to order at Intervarsity Press
https://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=3627