It’s hard to talk about this book without spoilers – and as much as I WANT to talk about it, I really don’t want to spoil it for you, because the revelations are part of the appeal. This is a book about missing children, adults with mental illness, a sort of revenge-plot, and cats. It’s about abuse and survival and hunting. It’s about living on the margins, and making amends with your past.
What details can you have about the plot? Well, let’s see … you can know that the story is told from multiple perspectives. Ted is an adult, and one of the primary perspectives from which we understand the plot. Eleven years prior to the events in the story a young girl goes to the beach with her family, and goes missing. Her family never recovers from that loss, and her older sister Dee continues to search for her, however futile that might seem. Her search brings her to Needless Street, where she buys the house next door to Ted on their relatively deserted street. She moves in because she thinks it is here that she will be able to help solve the crime that lingers over every aspect of her life.
I heard a lot of really positive hype about this novel, and while I did enjoy it – and continue to think about it now – I was also really frustrated by certain elements. Again, it’s hard to talk about the story itself without spoilers – I can’t say much more about the plot. I will say that it gets very creepy, and there are points where it feels quite confusing. Much of that is explained in our eventual understanding of what is going on – and a reader could likely predict most or even all of it. At least one of the multiple perspectives had me super frustrated for most of the novel, and at times it felt like the novel was less creepy and more chaotic. I found the afterward to be useful in untangling the story in my mind. I have reservations about the ultimate plot twist, not only from a stylistic point of view but also I wonder if it’s an appropriate way to depict mental illness. All in all, I was a bit underwhelmed by the book.
