When Emily Went Missing

One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Indie Books of 2021
A Kirkus Reviews' Indie Best Books of the Month for September 2021

Ruth Gonzales has survived a traumatic event but awakens to discover all sorts of strange things. She is dreaming memories that are not her own. She occasionally knows strange historical facts she can't remember ever learning. And then there's the poisonous flower garden that whispers its secrets to Ruth. They killed the farmer's wife a century ago. They may have poisoned Van Gogh. Ruth just wants to be normal again, but when one of her classmates mysteriously disappears and Ruth begins to have dreams of her in a world of oil paintings she realizes things may never be normal again as she unravels the truth about what really happened when Emily went missing.

Summary from Kirkus Reviews, starred review:
A young woman experiences supernatural horticulture in small-town Texas.

Weems balances the mixture of small-town ways and supernatural happenings with an easy, seasoned confidence. The key to this success is his decision to tell the story from the immediate viewpoint of Ruth herself—and to invest her with a quirky, dark, sharply observant personality more reminiscent of a Flannery O'Connor character than of Harper Lee's Scout. This decision allows Weems to flex his comic talents even in the grimmest moments of the plot. At one particularly dark moment at the book's climax, for instance, Ruth spots a procession of fire ants floating together across the surface of a body of water and thinks they look "like a bunch of drunk college kids floating the Guadalupe." The twin forces impinging on Ruth's post-shooting life—the brainless, gossiping cruelty of her classmates (one more than others, the Emily of the book's title) and Ruth's own burgeoning supernatural experiences—lead her to commune not only with dead people, but also with the mysterious garden itself: "You can sleep here. Sleep in the dirt with us," that garden voice tells her. "It's peaceful here….You can rest while we'll watch over you." The narrative moves ahead at its own distinctly idiosyncratic pace, with Ruth digressing at pretty much any point she pleases. The result is entirely winning, a story that manages to be simultaneously dark and heartwarming.

A gripping, ultimately endearing supernatural tale about an odd girl and an even odder garden.