“Sometimes at night, he’s out there.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (JUL 7, 2011)

There’s one thing you can count on with author Megan Abbott, you can never predict which direction her novels will take you. Abbott’s first novel, Die a Little is set in 50s Hollywood and is an exploration of the strange relationship between two women. Then came The Song is You, based on the unsolved disappearance of actress Jean Spangler. This novel was followed by Queenpin, the story of a female book keeper who works for a glamorous, hard-as-nails mob-connected woman. Abbott’s next novel, Bury me Deep, set in the 30s, is a fictionalized account of a real-life murder. And that brings me to The End of Everything, a deeply engrossing book in which Abbott explores the relationship between two 13-year-old girls. I don’t care for a child narrator, but there are hints that this tale is told by Lizzie in adulthood years later.

The End of Everything is set in contemporary times in a sleepy Midwestern upscale community, and the tale is narrated by Lizzie Hood–a 13-year-old who is about to graduate from middle school. She lives with her older brother, Ted and her divorced mother in a large house right next door to her inseparable friend, Evie Verver. Lizzie’s mother is having an affair with a local married doctor, and he sneaks into the house at night for furtive trysts. Since things are not always so hot at Lizzie’s house, it makes a lot of sense for Lizzie to spend a great deal of time at Evie’s house. Evie’s home seems to be the perfect, safe haven for the two girls to hang out together. While Evie’s mother is in the shadowy background, focused on domestic tasks, Evie’s father is kind, concerned and very involved in the lives of his two daughters: Evie and her “deeply glamorous” older sister, 17-year-old Dusty:

“A movie star, in halter tops and eyelet and clacking Dr. Scholl’s. Eyelashes like gold foil and eyes the colour of watermelon rind and a soft, curvy body. Always shiny-lipped and bright white-teethed, lip smack, flash of tongue, lashes bristling, color high and surging up her cheeks.”

The summer begins just “like a million other girl summers.” But then the unthinkable happens…one day Evie disappears. There are no clues to her whereabouts, and Lizzie was one of the last people to see her. Then Lizzie remembers seeing a maroon sedan slowly coasting back and forth right before Evie disappeared….

Megan Abbott captures not only the voice of a vulnerable 13-year-old girl, but she also captures the grief, the desperation, and also the paranoia that surrounds Evie’s disappearance. In Evie’s absence, Lizzie is increasingly drawn to the Verver household. She feels the need to fill the void left by Evie. Being in Evie’s home and even wearing her clothes somehow makes Lizzie feel less helpless, but since this is a Megan Abbott novel, there are darker forces at play. Lizzie becomes the central figure in the maelstrom surrounding Evie’s disappearance. While Lizzie’s classmates speculate about what is happening to Evie and luxuriate in the lurid imagined details, Lizzie is drawn deeper and deeper into the secrets behind Evie’s disappearance.

The End of Everything, an impressive change of pace for Abbott, has the macabre feel of a Grimm’s fairy tale, and this is achieved partly through the author’s playful use of language and through the references to the Verver girls as “princesses.” This riveting story builds a safe world and then dismantles it, brick by brick while exploring the loss of innocence. The disappearance of a 13- year-old-girl is terrifying, but there’s another secret predatory terror here that lurks in the corner just off the page and slightly out-of-focus. Abbott strips away the safety net of family and gives us a dark glimpse of what festers underneath:

“These are all the good things, and there were such good things. But then there were the other things, and they seemed to come later, but what if they didn’t? What if everything was there all along, creeping soundlessly from corner to corner, shuddering fast from Evie’s nighttime whispers, from the dark hollows of that sunny-shingled house, and I didn’t hear it? Didn’t see it?”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 61 readers
PUBLISHER:	Reagan Arthur Books (July 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Megan Abbott and new blog
EXTRAS:	Excerpt MF Interview with Megan Abbott
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: Bury Me Deep Queenpin The Song is You

Bibliography:

• Die a Little (2005)
• The Song is You (2007)
• Queenpin (2007) 
• Bury Me Deep (2009)
• The End of Everything (2011)
• Dare Me (July 2012)

“And this very book began not as a book but as an obit of a kind for a little girl who up and went missing one simple summer day. On this girl we pinned all hopes of our dying town’s salvation. The longer we went without seeing her even once, the more and more dependent upon her we grew. She became our leading industry, her sudden nothingness a valuable export, and we considered changing the name of our town to hers; we would live in the town of ‘Lenore’. Is it any wonder we refused to give up hope despite all the signs that she’d never existed, that she’d never been anybody – never, not even before she supposedly vanished?”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAY 1, 2011)

The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert is a small gem. Its multi-plotted story takes place in a small Nebraska town with characters who make this novel special. The town is peopled by a lot of old folks. Essie, the protagonist, is 83 and the novel is told in first person from her point of view. “We were all of us quite old, we death merchants – the town’s undertaker (seventy-eight), his organist (sixty-seven)…the florist (her freezer overgrown with lilies, eighty-one). The cemetery’s caretaker, who procured for the goth high schoolers who partied among the tombstones, was the enfant terrible among us (at an immature fifty-six.”

Essie writes obituaries for the town’s local paper which is owned by her grandson, Doc. She feels very close to the people she writes about and wants to know as much about them as possible, both the good and the bad. Essie had a son who died in an automobile accident many years ago, leaving two children – Essie’s grandson Doc and her granddaughter Ivy. Essie also has a teenaged great granddaughter named Tess with whom she is very close. Doc has raised Tess for most of her life as Ivy ran off to Paris with one of her professors when Tess was seven. As the novel opens, Ivy has just returned to town and her relationship with Tess is tenuous.

There are two very eventful things going on in town. The first is the alleged disappearance of a child named Lenore. No one has ever seen or met Lenore. Lenore’s mother, Daisy, says that her boyfriend Elvis abducted her. Supposedly, Lenore was born at home and home schooled. That’s the reason that no one has ever seen her and no records of her birth exist. The town is split into those who believe Lenore existed and was abducted and those who think that Lenore is merely a figment of Daisy’s imagination. Is Daisy delusional or has there really been a crime committed? Much of the book focuses on these questions.

The other big event in town is top secret. There is a young adult book series based on two characters named Miranda and Desiree. Think Harry Potter in terms of popularity. The publishers want a very out of the way place to print it and they choose this small Nebraska town. The paper that the book is printed on is very special. It contains grass seeds and herbs so that its “greenness” won’t harm the environment. The author, William Muscatine, has a correspondence with Essie that is top secret. They are pen pals and friends of a sort.

As word of the abduction gets out and travels around the country, people gather in town to park and camp all around Daisy’s ranch which is called “The Crippled Eighty.” These folks are known as Lenorians. It becomes somewhat cultish and these folks form a tight and closed circle around Daisy. They are hangers-on and try to keep other people away from Daisy.

Meanwhile, Ivy and Tess are trying to rebuild their relationship, which is a very difficult task. Tess had lived with Doc for the past six years and decides to move in with Ivy which hurts Doc’s feelings. Essie tries not to get too involved in their decisions. Tess often comes to Essie for advice and support. Essie and Tess have one of those special relationships that is comprised of love and mutual respect.

Essie attempts to solve the mystery of Lenore and also protect the secrecy of the book printing. She manages to get herself into different sorts of trouble and ends up with a real crisis on her hands. The characters in this gentle and compassionate book truly speak to the reader. In other hands this book would seem too light but Shaffert does an expert job of making the reader care and want to keep reading in order to find out what happens next. He does a good job of poking fun at the publishing industry, painting vivid portraits of dysfunctional families, and showing the sensibilities of a small town. This is quite an enjoyable book, one that leaves a sweet and mellow feeling with me. This is the first book I’ve read by Schaffert but I plan to check out his others.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Unbridled Books; 1 edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Timothy Schaffert
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt An interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another good read set in Nebraska: Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

• The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (2002)
• The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (2005)
• Devils in the Sugar Shop (2007)
• The Coffins of Little Hope (2011)
• The Swan Gondola (February 2014)

“He wasn’t a murderer but he wasn’t innocent either. No one was free of crime – his crime was vague, elsewhere, nowhere, a crime not of passion but of passivity, of indifference, of failing to see people. And someone had to murder her. Someone had to confess, to offer her family that relief, to bear the burden of the horror, to be linked forever and always to that girl.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (FEB 28, 2011)

In this discomforting debut book, every character – and there are many – is guilty of the crime of passivity. It starts with the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl, Leonora – a good girl, who does everything right, a cautious and obedient young lady who possesses “calm confidence, concern for the lower classes, a dimple in her right cheek.”

Yet this is not a book about Leonora, who inhabits a small fraction of the 360+ pages. Rather, it’s about all kinds of “missing” children – children who have grown up, those who have gone missing emotionally or physically, those who have been exploited or who have grown alien to themselves and their families. It is, at its core, a book about trying to find one’s place in a careless world.

Sarah Braunstein uses an interlocking story format to introduce several characters to form a sort of kaleidoscopic of our own desperate and hopeless efforts to pursue and yet push away the things in life we want the most.

We meet Paul (ironically renamed Pax, which stands for “peace”) – a boy who has run away from an abusive stepfather and who experiences not a moment of peace, who “felt a desire to smash love into his body, to smash love into the world, to allow love to be the violent act he’d always suspected it was.” We get acquainted with Judith (another irony – her name stands for “freedom”) who is anything but free; she marries young, moves to exactly the kind of quiet “every town” she’s wanted to escape, but in the end, cannot. We get to know Sam, her young husband, an orphaned character who does everything right, but cannot break free to live larger than what appears to be his predestined fate.

These and other characters bump and grind and thrash against each other, meeting up in odd ways, experiencing the bad in life and surviving in slightly diminished forms. Children grow up, adults flash back to childhood traumas and all have been affected in one way or the other. As Pax says about his childhood home, “I expected it to be – like, neutral. How stupid. Nothing is neutral, right? Least of all the home you grew up in.”

Little by little, Ms. Braunstein explores these characters’ fears – of shame and abandonment and loss of control and hope. Although the desire for transformation and reinvention is strong, it is difficult to obtain. And as they strive, the eyes of the missing Leonora peer down from ubiquitous billboards, not unlike the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby. I suspect it is no coincidence that Leonora’s eyes perform the same function as Dr. Eckleburg’s – watching over their respective desolate and foul wastelands with a certain aura of judgment.

This is not a “feel good” book nor does it always work; there is such a large cast of characters and so many stories pleading for attention that it’s easy to become a little lost in the wilderness. Yet this novel – which spans decades – is also confidently written with many strong insights and an original voice. While it is not a book I’d recommend for everyone, it is a rewarding book for those who can handle multifaceted themes and wish to experience a writer on the cusp of potential greatness.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (February 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sarah Braunstein
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books, if you like this one: American Salvageby Bonnie Jo Campbell The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard

Bibliography:

• The Sweet Relief Missing Children (February 2011)

“We imagined her with us, more beautiful than our wives, more aloof, more tender, more kind. We imagined her future and our own. We closed our eyes and fell asleep to Nora Lindell, alive and happy. In the morning, we advanced to adulthood, relieved at last of childhood fantasies.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JAN 26, 2011)

Lately, there have been a number of books about missing girls and what they signify for those left behind. The forthcoming The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sara Braunstein and last summer’s paperback release of Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan spring instantly to mind.

In Hannah Pittard’s absorbing The Fates Will Find Their Way, this territory is mined again, and quite convincingly. Sixteen-year-old Nora vanishes one day and no one knows quite what happened. What’s left is a series of rumors, imaginings, suspicions, and what-ifs from teenage boys whose lives she touched.

Ms. Pittard makes a risky choice in using the first person plural for narration – the “we” tense. It’s a hard tense to pull off, but she does it quite well. For instance, as the boys grow to men, she writes, “We owned homes, had wives. Some of us had more than one child by then. In many ways, we were kings. Everything was ahead of us…”

But is it? As the fates dictate that the boys settle down into preordained future roles, something is lost in each of them. At one point, the narrator looks back to a time when the future was more limitless: “Our only limitation was our imagination, and that school year – and every school year after – our imagination seemed to grow, to outdo, what we’d ever believed possible. We outran our wildest fantasies. That is, until Nora Lindell went missing…”

Nora is the fixed mark in time of all that might have been. Her life remains limitless, at least in the imaginings of her now-adult classmates; she took off to Arizona, she became pregnant, she married a much-older man, and so on. Their lives, however, are constrained by the realities of life, the wives and the babies and jobs and the homes as they sleepwalk forward. Ms. Pittard writes, “Certain outcomes are unavoidable, invariable, absolutely unaffectable, and yet completely unpredictable. Certain outcomes are that way. But maybe not Nora’s. Maybe she was the only one who escaped…”

This haunting and minimalistic book has but one flaw in my opinion: Nora is consistently a symbol and never acquires that real-life mystique and fascination that would cause these teenage boys to remain starry-eyed and reverent way into adulthood. The conceit overpowers the reality of the story.

That aside, there is some mighty fine writing from a debut author and some deep psychological insights that keeps the reader turning pages. The Fates Will Find Their Way is a lovely little gem.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco (January 25, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Hannah Pittard
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other missing girl stories: Fragile by Lisa Unger The Vanishing of Katharina Linden by Helen Grant The False Friend by Myla Goldberg Eve Green by Susan Fletcher And one of the best missing child stories: The Disapparation of James by Anne

Bibliography:

• The Fates Will Find Their Way (January 2011)

“It didn’t take long for tensions to build. The three of them – the pretty cheerleader, the sexy burnout too old, too knowing for her age, the geek with gothic leanings – they were all there, these representative of the perennial high school subcultures. Squirming and pink beneath the shells of their adulthoods. Maggie thought that childhood things would be left behind, these silly groupings would fade and become meaningless, but they never were. Not in a town like this. Those teenage girls, each awkward and unsure in her own way, never left the Hollows.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster (JAN 08, 2011)

Fragile is set in a small town 100 miles from New York City, called “The Hollows.” The dynamics between family clusters, over the generations within the sometimes stifling small-town boundaries, form the emotional backbone of this well-crafted thriller.

The central group is the Cooper family. With Jones (the father) being the chief detective in the Hollows police force and Maggie (the mother) being a psychologist, they are strategically placed to know what’s going on in town when something out of the ordinary happens. Their son Ricky is a high school student, and the disappearance of his girlfriend Charlene is the signal for the mystery to begin in earnest.

There are two other main family groups. The first group is that of the Murrays: with moody Melody the mother, Charlene the disappearing would-be rock star, and Graham the stepfather with dubious intentions. The second is the Crosbys: the family with a strong current of violence and intimidation, which includes the mostly absent mother Angie, Travis the bully policeman father, and Marshall their deeply troubled son.

The childhood histories of the generation now in their prime are insolubly linked. As their past actions seem to have become part of the silent fabric of the Hollows, a unique dread, like a recurring nightmare, stalks the story as the plot unfolds. Unspoken terror of retributive karma lends the narrative a tinge of ghost-like fear.

Two entwined themes weave through the novel with the intensity of obsession. The first of these is the theme of the lost girl.

No fewer than three lost girls wander through the pages of Fragile. Charlene Murray, the current missing girl, is the novel’s immediate raison d’être. Sarah Myer, from a generation back, brings the weight of the past to the narrative. Charlie the pest-control guy’s Lily brings a resonating chord from the world outside the Hollows.

As Unger states in a note on the text, the core idea for the narrative evolved from an incident in her childhood, where a student went missing from her own high-school. One is left with a distinct impression that the distance of the memory, its initial emotional impact and the diverse aspects in which it has reflected on in the author’s own life have a strong bearing on the general tone of the novel. How memory both changes the future and shapes our perception of what we now are is the subject of the other main theme of the novel: change.

In the most concrete sense, change and the lack of it are built up through family portrayals, in shards of continuity or broken lines. Maggie would like to paint but she’s too busy – meanwhile her mother’s attic is full of her father’s old paintings. Charlie would like to write, and eventually finds out that his father used to write. Charlie’s colleague Wanda knows all about cars because her daddy worked for Ford. The Crosby family are all policemen and bullies– “the gene gets stronger every generation.” Jones hates his mother for dominating his life, but dominates his son and disbelieves him in turn, reflecting his own fears onto Ricky without bothering to think about who the new generation really is.

Which links can or should be broken? What kind of change is possible? Through exploration of these relationships, so circumscribed by location and custom, the novel eventually posits that only by admitting the past – both our own deeds and those of our forbears – and incorporating it into our existence, can we “grow up.”  The crystallisation that hidden fear forces onto a character is a type of stagnation, a decomposition.

Through the pages of carefully-constructed prose one clearly sees a diligent writer taking enviable care in their craft: a writer who hates sloppiness and unintentional ambiguity. This preciseness for a long time seemed to sit at odds with a certain out-of-focus quality to the tenor of the narrative.

Initially I put this characteristic down to lack of immediate “need to write;”  it seemed to suggest meticulous but slightly mechanical work without a great deal of emotional force behind it. This conclusion was somewhat spurred on by the fact that character portrayal in Fragile is extremely female-heavy, and empathy for any character is late in coming. Not to say that we don’t know how the male characters look, behave or think – it’s that we don’t feel what it’s like to be inside them. Not even Jones, who is heavily analysed.

However, as the story progressed it started to become apparent that the emotional freeze imposed on the writing was precisely mirroring that which the characters suffered from. The thaw descends on the structure of the language, the plot, and the characters simultaneously. Such a demonstration of union between language, emotion and story is truly impressive.

I went in a sceptic, and came out a fan. Unger’s Beautiful Lies is already sitting on my shelf, waiting.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 86 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown; 1 edition (August 3, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lisa Unger
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Sliver of Truth Beautiful Lies

Bibliography:

• Beautiful Lies (April 2006)
• Sliver of Truth (January 2007)
• Black Out (May 2008)
• Die for You (June 2009)
• Fragile (August 2010)
• Darkness, My Old Friend (August 2011)

“My life might have been so different, had I not been known as the girl whose grandmother exploded. And had I not been born in Bad Munstereifel. If we had lived in the city – well, I’m not saying the event would have gone unnoticed, but the fuss would probably only have lasted a week before public interest moved elsewhere.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (OCT 10, 2010)

Even in these dramatic opening lines, British author Grant’s first novel has a beguiling, self-absorbed, coming-of-age tone well suited to its appealing 10-year-old narrator, Pia Kolvenbach. Pia is actually recalling these events from young adulthood, seven years later; a distance that allows a certain wry humor in her approach to her younger self, while retaining the immediacy of her traumatic experiences.

Daughter of an English mother and German father, Pia has enjoyed an uneventful childhood in the tiny, ancient, comfortably hidebound town of Bad Munstereifel. This comes to an abrupt end when her grandmother accidentally sets herself on fire lighting the last Advent candle at the family celebration the Sunday before Christmas.

By the time Pia gets back to school the tragic event has taken on sensational proportions. Rumor has turned her grandmother into a gruesome bomb and the morbidly excited children have banded together, shunning Pia in case “the exploding” is catching. The only child who steps up to befriend her is the class’ most unpopular member, StinkStefan, whose parents are the town drunks.

Mortified, Pia attempts to ignore him, but it’s lonely having no friends and when kindly old Herr Schiller invites them both to his house for cakes and coffee, Pia capitulates. She had often gone to visit Herr Schiller with her grandmother and loves his embroidered tales of olden days, when the old mill was full of ghosts, witches and demons and only Unshockable Hans could bear to live there, unafraid of the disembodied groans, howls and menaces.

Then a child disappears at Karneval– Katharina Linden, dressed up as Snow White – and Pia, enthralled by fairy tales and folklore, thinks the disappearance must be supernatural. “How else could she have been spirited away from under the very noses of her family, in broad daylight too, in a town where everyone knew everyone else?”

Inspired by the tales of Unshockable Hans, and wishing to be the center of more admiring and envying attention at school (one particularly malicious bully has suggested that Katharina cannot be found because she “caught” the exploding and ended up in little unidentifiable bits), Pia begins to wonder if she could discover what happened to Katharina.

When another girl disappears and Pia and Stefan (who is inspired by action movies as well as folktales) discover that these mysterious events echo a similar disappearance years before they were born, they determine to do some investigating on their own.

Meanwhile hysteria rises in the small town, as parents are afraid to let their children out of their sight. Tensions mount between Pia’s parents as her mother – who has never really gotten the hang of Bad Munstereifel – clamors to move to England, a proposition resisted by Pia as much as by her father.

The children’s efforts – spying on witches and more corporal suspects – builds to a white-knuckled climax terrifyingly rooted in reality, all the more shocking for the contrast between children’s dark fantasies and the even darker dangers of reality.

Grant was inspired to write this novel by the actual town of Bad Munstereifel, where she lived for seven years. She found the town and its lore (including Unshockable Hans) magical – which doesn’t stop her from pegging the artful spite of the town gossip – and her novel is steeped in place and custom. Grant weaves German holiday traditions into the narrative and makes the insularity and neighborliness of such a tiny village integral to the plot.

Grant’s debut is an odd, beguiling, terrifying novel, rich in atmosphere, with an honest and plucky heroine. Readers will look forward to finding out where Grant goes next in her second novel, The Glass Demon, to be published next year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 42 readers
PUBLISHER:	Delacorte Press; 1 edition (August 10, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Helen Grant
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More children that go missing: The False Friend by Myla Goldberg The Disapparation of James by Anne Ursu Also by Helen Grant: The Glass Demon

Bibliography:

• The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (2009; 2010 in US)
• The Glass Demon (2010; June 2011 in US)
• Wish Me Dead (2011 in UK)

“A friendship like hers and Djuna’s could only ever be a child’s possession. Only a child could withstand its stranglehold.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 7, 2010)

Celia Durst and Djuna Pearson are best friends in middle school and have been queens of their clique since elementary school. They have a very tight, mercurial and labile relationship but they usually get over their fights very quickly. One day, as they are acting out by walking in a wooded area where they aren’t supposed to go, Djuna and Celia have a fight. Celia walks away from Djuna and moments later Djuna is abducted by a man in a brown car. Three of the other girls from their clique are there and witness this event. Djuna is never seen or heard from again despite extensive police investigation. Celia can never remember the details of the event until she becomes an adult and then her memory of what actually happened is very different from what allegedly transpired.

The False Friend by Myla Goldberg opens twenty years after Djuna’s disappearance. Celia is an auditor for the city of Chicago and has been living with Huck, a history teacher, since right after college. Her relationship with Huck is in stasis and Celia is worried that he will leave her. Huck wants children and Celia is not up for parenting. Celia suddenly has a recovered memory about Djuna’s disappearance. She remembers walking with Djuna, the two of them having a fight, and then Djuna falling into a hole (like an abandoned well) while Celia just walks away and leaves her there, never telling anyone. Celia decides to fly back east to upstate New York where she grew up to do some reality-testing. She wants to tell her parents about her memories and talk to the other girls who were there that day.

This book is as much about the relationships of ten and eleven-year-old girls as it is about Djuna’s disappearance. Ms. Goldberg’s knowledge of the way that girls can be cruel to one another is right on the mark. There is one girl named Leanne who is always trying to be part of Djuna and Celia’s group but they make it almost impossible for her. Instead of telling her no or ignoring her, they shame and humiliate her. “Standing Leanne against the flagpole had lent their scrutiny an official air. Starting from her head, they worked their way down, inspecting the way she pushed her hair behind her ears, the slope of her neck as it emerged from her shirt, or some other random aspect of Leanne’s body completely beyond her control. Occasionally they would give Leanne homework, and she would show up the next day wearing something with flowers on it, or having curled her bangs. A passed inspection meant she was free to join them at lunch and recess: failure meant she had to earn their company.” This ritual was repeated daily and Leanne was graded harshly, especially by Djuna. This went on for several grades. Sadly, Leanne was such an easy mark and never spoke up for her own defense nor gave up trying to please the unpleasable.

Right after Celia recovers her memory, she returns to her hometown and tries to research the events of the traumatic day that Djuna disappeared. She attempts to contact the other girls, now women, to see what they remember. One of them has been so traumatized by Djuna’s disappearance that it is reflected in her life’s work. Celia finds out how immeasurably painful their treatment of Leanne was to her. Many of the realizations she acquires are more about the way they were as girls than about the disappearance itself. I think that this is one of the main points that Ms. Goldberg is making in the book – Celia is hoping to find something out that can no longer be separated from who she was as a girl.

Complicating matters is the way that Celia’s parents interact with each other and with Celia. They are both quite repressed and restrained individuals. Emotions are hard for them to show. Celia begins to see herself in her parents and compares this to Huck’s love and emotional expressiveness versus her personal restraint.

As Celia discusses her new revelations with Huck, her parents and her childhood friends, they all have different reactions to her. What is more interesting than their reactions, however, is what she finds out about them now in comparison to who they were when they were children. The book touches on nature and nurture along with the difficulties of child-rearing, especially parents allowing for autonomy and individuation.

This book is a literary mystery on several levels. It is a search for the truth of that one day when Djuna disappears, the search for who these five girls were twenty years ago, and how these girls became the women they are today. While Ms. Goldberg is excellent at portraying the behaviors and emotions of pre-adolescent girls, segments of the book can be confusing and create challenges. At times I became unclear about what Celia is looking for and what she actually finds. Perhaps this is part of the mystery. When we go back into the past, we can only go so far and we can’t take our childhood selves with us as adult excavators.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 35 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Myla Goldberg
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another look at growing up: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro Another “girlfriends” mystery: Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman

Bibliography:

• Bee Season (May 2000)
• Wickett’s Remedy (September 2005)
• The False Friend (October 2010)

Essays:

• Time’s Magpie: A Walk in Prague (November 2004)

Children’s book:

• Catching the Moon (May 2007)

Movies from books:

• Bee Season (2005)

“Who’s there?”

Suddenly there were other people in the room. A man with a camera. Another with what looked like a boom mike. And the female with a familiar voice, a stunning woman with chestnut brown hair and a business suit.

“Wendy Tynes, NTC News. Why are you here Dan?”

I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I recognized the woman from the TV newsmagazine…

“Why have you been conversing online in a sexual manner with a thirteen-year old girl, Dan? We have your communications with her.”
…the one that sets up and catches pedophiles on camera for all the world to see.

“Are you here to have sex with a thirteen-year-old girl?”

The truth of what was going on there hit me, freezing my bones. Other people flooded the room. Producers maybe. Another cameraman. Two cops. The cameras came in closer. The lights got brighter. Beads of sweat popped up on my brow. I started to stammer, started to deny.

But it was over.

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale (MAR 23, 2010)

Dan Mercer’s life very quickly changes for the worst as TV newswoman Wendy Tynes catches him going to a meeting with a thirteen-year old girl she pretends to be to lore pedophiles like she thinks Dan is into her trap. Dan is vehement in his innocence and as the reader knows, he thought he was going to help a young girl not to have sex with her. However, in this case, despite the evidence against him, Wendy starts to have some doubt, especially when Dan’s ex-wife and her husband seem so willing to defend him. Dan’s slick lawyer is able to use some legal technicalities to get Dan off from the crimes charged against him, but the community still feels Dan is guilty and he is forced to go into hiding.

At around the same time, 17-year old Haley McWaid a smart, athletic and apparently happy teenager does not return home. Very little is found about her disappearance until evidence points to Dan Mercer when Haley’s phone is found in Dan’s hotel room months after Haley’s disappearance. The phone is found right after Wendy Tynes sees Dan murdered by the father of a child who also claims Dan abused him. Although Dan’s dead body is not found, the police are able to find Dan’s hotel room with the missing phone under his bed.

Wendy’s uncertainty of Dan’s guilt is lessened once Haley McWaid’s cell phone is found in Dan’s room. However during her investigations of Dan’s background, she does talk to some of Dan’s former friends including his Princeton college roommates. Wendy discovers that Dan had lived in a suite with 5 other people all of whom have fallen on hard times, with most having potentially unfounded but damaging claims against them. These unusual circumstances, along with the possible guilt of ruining an innocent man, make Wendy look further to see if Dan is really the guilty pedophile he seems to be.

Caught is told primarily in the third person perspective usually from the perspective of Wendy Tynes. However, the book does start in the first person as Coben gives the reader a chance to see into the mind of Dan Mercer before he is caught by Wendy Tynes. Mercer comes across as someone who truly cares about the youth he spends most of his time helping, adding, at least to the reader, more doubt about Dan’s guilt.

Caught is Harlan Coben’s latest standalone book, the first since Hold Tight (2008) after last year’s latest Myron Bolitar book, Long Lost. As typical of Coben’s books, most of the action in this book takes place in northern New Jersey near where he grew up and not too far from where Coben now lives.

As I mentioned in the Long Lost review, I’ve read all of Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar books, but only one prior non-series book, Tell No One. I thought that Tell No One was better than any of the Bolitar books and was really looking forward to Caught. Although at first, I thought Caught was even better than Tell No One, that feeling did not last throughout the book and by the end although I was not disappointed, I did not think it held up as well. Caught certainly has the great suspense and twists but I was less surprised at the end than I thought I would be. This is not to say that the book was not good or that the ending easily determined, just that a twist was expected. Overall, though, this was a very good book and one that keeps you interested from the beginning to the end.

One thing that is not very prevalent in Harlan Coben’s standalone books is the humor that is a key part of the Myron Bolitar series. Of course Caught is a serious book that also addresses serious issues about missing children and child molesters so the chance for humor is limited. However, look for a friend of Myron Bolitar who  is fun and enjoyable to make a cameo appearance.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 272 readers
PUBLISHER:	Dutton Adult (March 23, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Harlan CobenWikipedia on Harlan Coben
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Play Dead From the Myron Bolitar series: Long Lost Live Wire

Bibliography:

• Play Dead (1990)
• Miracle Cure (1991)
• Tell No One (2001)
• Gone for Good (2002)
• No Second Chance (2003)
• Just One Look (2004)
• The Innocent (2005)
• The Woods (2007)
• Hold Tight (2008)
• Caught (2010)
• Stay Close (2012)
• Six Years (March 2013)

Myron Bolitar Series:

• Deal Breaker (1995)
• Drop Shot (1996)
• Fade Away (1996) /
• Back Spin (1997)
• One False Move (1998)
• The Final Detail (1999)
• Darkest Fear (2000)
• Promise Me (2006)
• Long Lost (2009)
• Live Wire (2011)

Mickey Bolitar (young adult series)

• Shelter (2011)
• Seconds Away (2012)

Movies from books:

• Tell No One (2006; 2009 on DVD)