When She Was Gone
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3.3 • 8 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Tom Perotta’s Little Children meets Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones in this suspenseful and beautifully wrought story of a seventeen-year-old girl who vanishes on the eve of her departure for college, as told through the alternating perspectives of her neighbors.
What happened to Linsey Hart? When the Cornell-bound teenager disappears into the steamy blue of a late-summer morning, her quiet neighborhood is left to pick apart the threads of their own lives and assumptions.
Linsey’s neighbors are just ordinary people—but even ordinary people can keep terrible secrets hidden close. There’s Linsey’s mother, Abigail, whose door-to-door searching makes her social-outcast status painfully obvious; Mr. Leonard, the quiet, retired piano teacher with insomnia, who saw Linsey leave; Reeva, the queen bee of a clique of mothers, now obsessed with a secret interest; Timmy, Linsey’s lovelorn ex-boyfriend; and George, an eleven-year-old loner who is determined to find out what happened to his missing neighbor.
As the days of Linsey’s absence tick by, dread and hope threaten to tear a community apart. This luminous new novel by the acclaimed author of The Orphan Sister explores coming of age in the shadows of a suburban life, and what is revealed when the light suddenly shines in. . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gross (The Orphan Sister) investigates the claustrophobia of the quiet, suburban New Jersey neighborhood where 17-year-old Linsey Hart has gone missing. Through multiple accounts from the perspective of Linsey's friends, family, and neighbors hints to the disappearance are gradually revealed. Next door neighbor Mr. Leonard, a retired music teacher suffering from colon cancer, was the last to see Linsey alive, while Reeva, a housewife with three children, frets over hiding her affair with a much younger man. Abigail Stein, Linsey's mother, discovers how alienated the neighbors have become while trying to solicit help tracking down her missing daughter. Timmy, Linsey's love-stricken ex-boyfriend, refuses to give up the search and enlists 10-year-old George Whitebread, a boy with a penchant for taking pictures of neighborhood denizens, to help unravel the mystery of Linsey's disappearance. At times, Gross stumbles as she attempts to bring inessential characters into the fold, but the distinct voices of her main characters shine through to reveal a community roiled by the mysterious disappearance of one of their own.
