2019 book 66

Felicity McLean's The Van Apfel Girls are Gone
This novel centers on a young woman, heading home to Australia from the US to visit her older sister, who is undergoing treatment for cancer. But both women are haunted by the disappearance of the titular Van Apfel girls, their friends and neighbors, twenty years earlier. The story weaves between the past and present to good effect—the story has a kind of Virgin Suicides vibe, though the women here seem slightly better adjusted than the narrators of that one. I thought this was good, but it didn’t necessarily stand out to me in the sea of books about missing girls? Definitely better written than most. B+.


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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in June. Content warning for brief scenes of animal abuse and child abuse.