Watch Me Disappear

May 22, 2017
Almost a year after failing to return from a solo hiking trip, Billie Flanagan has been presumed dead. However, her teenage daughter Olive refuses to believe it. As the anniversary of her mother’s disappearance approaches, Olive begins having visions that lead her to believe Billie is still alive and trying to communicate with her telepathically. Olive’s father, Peter, who has let go of any hope for Billie’s return and is writing a memoir about their lives together, believes Olive is having seizures and should be medicated. After Peter quits his job to work on the book, intense concentration on his and Billie’s life leading up to the hiking trip uncovers clues that their marriage wasn’t all he thought it was. If he chooses to accept his daughter’s idea that his wife may still be alive, he risks shattering every happy memory he has of their past. But living a painful lie might be a worse outcome for everyone. Brown’s (All We Ever Wanted Was Everything) novel is more than just a page-turning suspense story. It’s a gripping family drama that focuses on the choices we make and the ties that bind us to the ones we love. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House.

May 1, 2017
A missing--presumed dead--woman's husband and teenage daughter struggle with her absence and the question of whether she is truly gone in this third novel by Brown (This Is Where We Live, 2010, etc.).Nearly a year after her mother, Billie, disappeared while hiking a wilderness trail in Northern California, Olive, a high school junior, starts having vivid visions. In them, Billie appears in a variety of settings, speaking short, inconclusive sentences that Olive believes mean she wants to be found. But if her mother is alive, why did she disappear? That happens to be the same question Olive's father, Jonathan, has begun asking himself after learning that Billie lied about several weekend trips she'd taken in the months before she vanished. As he digs deeper, Jonathan uncovers too many secrets to ignore, shaking his understanding of his wife and marriage but otherwise pointing in no particular direction. While he worries that Billie was unfaithful, Olive worries that she's in danger. Both concerns feel justified; neither feels like the whole story. All the themes here are well-trod. There's the family coping with loss and its attendant questions. There's the Manic Pixie Dream Girl who's revealed to be darker and possibly more dangerous than believed. There's the supernatural quality of Olive's visions (is there a medical explanation, and does it matter?). There's the natural shifting that happens in a family when children turn into teenagers, and there's the ode on perfect Berkeley motherhood. It's because the author deftly incorporates all these themes into one building mystery, however, that the book is so page-turning. Readers are likely to be unsure of which outcome would be most satisfying until the very end. Moody but restrained, this is a familiar tale that sets out to upend itself--and succeeds.

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April 15, 2017

Essayist and journalist Brown's third novel (This Is Where We Live; All We Ever Wanted Was Everything) explores a family shaken when wife and mother Billie disappears on a solo hiking trip and is presumed dead. Jonathan mourns his restless wife, while adolescent daughter Olive starts seeing her mother in visions and is convinced that she is alive. The duo's journey of grief is delicately handled, alongside their suspenseful search for the truth about Billie. But as they uncover multiple secrets from her past, they find out that you never really know someone. With romantic subplots and surprise elements, including an unexpected finale, this evenly paced novel is multilayered enough to have wide appeal. A domestic suspense novel along the lines of A.S.A. Harrison's The Silent Wife or Shari Lapena's The Couple Next Door, this has less overt violence and a more emotional story at its heart. The mystery behind Billie's disappearance is subtle and intertwined with the idea of family and identity. VERDICT Readers interested in exploring the fissures in marriages and the arc of a character's journey through a dramatic story will enjoy this.--Melanie Kindrachuk, Stratford P.L., Ont.

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Starred review from June 1, 2017
Billie wasn't always a Berkeley supermom. She had a tumultuous childhood, a rebellious adolescence, even a felonious period in her early twenties. When she met Jonathan, a straitlaced technology editor, she finally felt ready to settle down. After she and Jonathan got married and had their daughter, Olive, Billie felt the stirrings of independence again. It started graduallygetting in the car and driving to Utah after a fight, then returning with an armful of groceries as if no time had passedbut her solo hiking trips and weekends away had become more frequent. When Billie disappears while hiking, police only find a shattered cell phone and a hiking boot near the trail. With little else to go on, Jonathan and Olive reassemble what they truly know about Billieand decide if they're willing to learn the whole truth. Like a darker, meatier Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2012), Brown's latest explores the messy inner life of a mother just starting to feel invisible to her own family. This brilliantly layered novel is full of twists and turns, tender and biting and vibrant. Readers who can't get enough of the Girl -type suspense trend will be more than satisfied with this tautly paced domestic drama.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)