When 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar disappears from her bunk at the summer camp her family has owned for years, the incident stirs up unhappy memories for her parents and the town at large. Fourteen years earlier, in 1961, her brother Bear had disappeared after being separated from his grandfather during a hike, and he was never seen again. Barbara’s disappearance is relayed in Moore’s text through it’s impact on the people around her, her bunkmate Tracey, a shy girl trying to get through her parents’ divorce, her counselor Louise, a young woman from “the wrong side of the tracks” trying to forge a better life for her and her young brother away from her mother’s chaotic behavior, her mother Alice, never the same after losing Bear, and Judyta, female police officer struggling to prove herself to her male colleagues. There are also frequent flashbacks to the summer Bear went missing, comparing and contrasting the two searches. The novel’s structure is sometimes frustrating, but the reader is thankfully always aware when events being depicted are taking place. Still, the back and forth between 1961 and 1975 can be dizzying.
Moore is good at creating characters for the reader to invest in, especially her female characters. They are distinct and fully shaded in, recognizably human and flawed without losing the reader’s empathy. The plot, too, is distinctive while firmly remaining within the parameters of the genre that readers find so familiar. While anyone who’s read a book like this before will suspect that the two disappearances are related, the exact nature of the connection will surprise nearly all of them.