Publisher Description
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Vanished tells the stories of women and girls in upstate New York who are often overlooked or unseen by the people around them. The characters range from an aging art professor whose students are uninterested in learning what she has to teach, to a young girl who becomes the victim of a cruel prank in a swimming pool, to a television producer who regrets allowing her coworkers into her mother’s bird-filled house to film a show about animal hoarding because it will reveal too much about her family and past.
Humorous and empathetic, the collection exposes the adversity in each character’s life; each deals with something or someone who has vanished—a person close to her, a friendship, a relationship—as she seeks to make sense of the world around her in the wake of that loss.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Lin-Greenberg's superb collection (after Faulty Predictions), dramatic scenes play out between students and teachers. Alice, a veteran college art teacher, wearily ferries her stuffed birds to the students' studio for a drawing exercise. There, Alice notices the popular, younger art teacher gathering Alice's own students for a different project when they should be drawing the birds, and Alice responds unexpectedly. In "Roland Raccoon," an elderly middle school teacher keeps a blind and nearly deaf raccoon named Roland as a pet and brings him in for show and tell. In "Lost or Damaged," the narrator, a high school student, follows the lead of her controlling best friend, Arielle. They observe a boy's act of kindness toward new student Olga, and jealousy prompts Arielle to smear Olga's reputation after she is made first chair in the orchestra instead of Arielle. The narrator is torn—she knows Olga suffers from Arielle's insults, but feels tethered to her friend—up to a point. Lin-Greenberg's flawless and insightful prose gives an acute sense of the characters' perspectives as they change. This accomplished work is full of surprises.
