Don't Breathe a Word

February 7, 2011
Family secrets and fairy lore create a shifting reality in McMahon's unsettling novel about the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl who longed to become Queen of the Fairies. Fifteen years after Lisa goes missing, her younger brother, Sam, gets a strange phone call that leads him and his girlfriend, Phoebe, to discover a book, supposedly written by the King of the Fairies, that Lisa used as her bible to cross over, and which prompts Sam and Phoebe to meet up with Sam's cousin, Evie, to see if they can figure out what happened to Lisa. Nothing is as it seems from that moment on, and Phoebe's longtime fear of a dark man in the shadows seeps back after she discovers, in true woo-woo fashion, that she is pregnant. McMahon (Promise Not to Tell) alternates between the past and present with loads of portent and foreshadowing, creating a rural Vermont chiller with a Rosemary's Baby vibe, but even after a surprising villainess emerges and more than a few disquieting passages about Lisa are burned through, many readers will remain in the dark.

March 15, 2011

A young girl disappears in the woods one summer night. The only clue to her whereabouts rests with her brother and her cousin, who never reveal what they know because to them it seems crazy--another one of her wild imaginings. The King of the Fairies was coming to take her away, she told them. And so, it would seem, he did. But 15 years later, Sam Nazzaro has grown up and moved on with his life when he receives word from his long-lost sister. She is back, and the Fairy King wants to make good on old promises, she says, to take what belongs to him. At first Sam is disbelieving, but soon he and his girlfriend, Phoebe, find themselves wrapped up in a sinister plot, no longer knowing what is real and what is imagined. VERDICT McMahon's (Dismantled) latest literary thriller seems designed to keep readers guessing, but with an overly complex plot and excess of characters, the thrill of suspense is lost amid confusion and frustrating loose ends. Only for the author's fans.--Leigh Wright, Bridgewater, NJ

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2011
Imaginative 12-year-old Lisa disappeared 15 years ago, right after she told her friends and family that she was crossing over to the fairy world. Her little brother, Sam, has grown up to be a levelheaded man who is still convinced that Lisa was abducted by a predator. When his girlfriend, Phoebe, receives a phone call from a frightened woman claiming to be Lisa, the two are seriously spooked and set out to discover the true identity of the mystery caller and what really occurred 15 years ago during the miserable summer Lisa went missing. She had claimed that running off with the king of the fairies, Teilo, was going to dramatically improve her life, since her father had recently overdosed and could barely talk, and her cousin Evie, with whom she had been especially close, was keeping secrets. McMahon moves the action between the past and the present and works overtime to shore up her elaborate plot, but she is so skillful that readers will be pulled right along by her affecting portrait of family dysfunction overlaid with the eeriness of the supernatural.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)