Author: Liz Moore
# of Pages: 478 (ebook)
Genre: Adult, Mystery, Historical Fiction
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Synopsis: Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found. As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.
Review: This was more of a slow historical drama with some underlying mystery than a page-turning mystery-thriller.
In fact, it was so NOT paging turning that I kept putting this book down because I was frustrated/bored. There's a few reasons for this:
- There's time skipping (between 1950s to 1970s) AND third person POV switching, which wouldn't have been a huge issue except Moore decided to switch between a billion side characters (some of which aren't super relevant and who's perspectives are never seen again later in the story). It's super painful because right when I'm getting into the story from one person's perspective, Moore switches to another person in a different time period which breaks the immersion.
- Since there's so many characters, there's a lot of chapters spent on telling the reader about their backgrounds which made the story progression very slow.
The writing actually was very good (4 star worthy), but the storytelling was painful (2-3 stars) because of the above points.
This is also one of the mysteries where I couldn't guess what happens because there's possible red herrings everywhere (make the reader appreciate the work investigators do and how hard it is to get to the truth). The ending is actually unsatisfying because it felt like it came out of nowhere rather than looking at the hints reader's received throughout the story with a different perspective.
On a completely different note, this book reminded me of The Great Gatsby in that there was strong messaging that rich people sucks, and the games they play with other people's lives is both self-serving and deeply destructive.
Overall a good but not great slow read. I don't regret reading but do think it is too slow-paced for me to recommend it highly.
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