I loved
Healey’s first novel, Elizabeth is
Missing (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/search?q=Elizabeth+is+Missing),
so I jumped at the chance to read her second one. I was not disappointed.
Lana
Maddox, fifteen, goes missing for four days.
When found, largely unharmed, she claims not to remember what
happened. Jen, Lana’s mother, is desperate
to find out where her daughter had been and takes increasingly desperate
measures to get to the truth.
The focus
of the book is a difficult mother-daughter relationship. Lana and Jen had not communicated well before
Lana’s disappearance. Worried about what
may have happened to Lana, Jen is desperate to make a connection with her
daughter, especially since Lana suffers from depression and has engaged in
self-harming activities and even made a suicide attempt in the past. Jen questions Lana constantly but as her
daughter continues to shut her out, Jen takes to stalking her, trolling her
social media accounts, listening to private conversations, and questioning her friends. None of these actions, of course, are appreciated
by Lana so their relationship becomes even more emotionally fraught.
Characterization
is a definite strength. Both Lana and
Jen are realistic, flawed characters.
Lana is a typical teenager who both loves and hates her mother. At times she shows outright contempt for
Jen: “’You’re always walking into people. Get some spatial awareness.’” and “’You look
ridiculous.’” and “’Can you not breathe like that, though? It’s superdistracting.’” Meg, Lana’s older sister, claims Lana manipulates
her mother and objects to “’the way she affects your mood, the way she has you tiptoeing
around.’” At other times, Lana shows
consideration for her mother; when Jen worries about looking old, Lana says, “’You
never look like you can’t apply your make-up properly . . . And you don’t have lines around your mouth.’”
Jen loves
her daughter and wants to understand and help her daughter. She just doesn’t know how to get Lana to open
up. It is so irritating to her that Lana talks to the world through her social
media accounts but won’t talk to her mother.
Jen’s clumsy efforts only result
in further alienating Lana. Jen worries
so much that her job performance is affected and she is unable to fully enjoy
Meg’s wonderful news. The relentless
stress of not knowing what happened to Lana causes Jen to become paranoid. She sees danger everywhere and even fears her
daughter is trying to physically injure her.
There is a
suspenseful atmosphere throughout. Since
events are seen through Jen’s perspective, it becomes difficult to determine
what is real and what is the result of Jen’s over-active imagination or paranoia,
“the hole of suspicion and desperate anxiety.” Is there a cat in the house? Is Lana really trying to hurt her
mother? Statements like “Lack of sleep
had made her see things before” and “People had a habit of accusing Jen of
imagining things” make the reader doubt what Jen sees. Jen’s mother comments, “’you do have a tendency
to worry unduly, don’t you?’” And Jen
often daydreams and finds herself “startled out of her reverie.” When things happen, she is sometimes not even
certain they happened: “she had become
so used to second-guessing herself that she wondered if she hadn’t dreamed the
incident.”
This book
is not full of action and adventure; it is a character study and an examination
of a complex mother-daughter relationship written in lucid prose. It is definitely recommended to readers who
appreciated Healey’s first novel or Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton.
Note: I received a digital ARC of the book from the
publisher via NetGalley.
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