Book review - After You Vanished

 

Title: After You Vanished

Author: E. A. Neeves

Genre: realistic fiction

Similar books: We Told Six Lies by Victoria Scott

                     Paper Towns by John Green

Rating:

 

defied some expectations

Summary (provided by publisher): Teddy’s favorite place is Bottomrock Lake, where sunfish swim in their little saucer nests and lilypads edge the shore. She’s worked there as a lifeguard every summer, including last year, when her twin sister Izzy waded into the lake for a midnight swim and never came out. Now, Teddy can’t stop scripting stories for where she went. Izzy was an accomplished swimmer, so she couldn’t possibly have drowned. And if she did somehow drown, where’s her body and why is her passport missing?
When Toby, the gorgeous jerk who was with Izzy on the night she vanished, comes to Bottomrock to work as a lifeguard alongside Teddy, she can’t help but be suspicious. How many of her sister’s secrets does he hold? And how can Teddy unearth them—without falling for the boy who watched her sister disappear?

My opinion: (Alert - here there be mild spoilers) At first, this seemed like it was set up to be a standard missing person narrative. Teddy and Toby track down secrets and threads that seemed to stymie the police. We expect them to uncover a vast conspiracy. Or people desperate to cover up dark secrets. Some of their clues sure point in that direction. But that's not really what this book is about. It's a story about grief and personal secrets. About discovering who your sister really was and realizing that you never know everything about a person. It's about accepting truth. And also about accepting things that you can't know and finding a way forward. It becomes a more introspective and thus a more realistic story.

Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley