Photo credit: Thomas Hawk / Foter.com / CC BY-NC
I picked up this book by Nova Ren Suma after reading this article about how male YA writers are getting more attention than female YA writers, despite the plethora of excellent books out there by female writers. The article contains a list of some YA books by female authors that the writer thinks are excellent, and this is one of them.
It’s not what I thought it was.
The the main character, Lauren, becomes fascinated by a “Missing” poster she finds of a 17-year-old girl she never knew, but who disappeared not far from Lauren’s home town a few months ago. The poster describes her as a runaway, but Lauren is convinced the girl (Abby) didn’t run away. She goes on a mission to find out what really happened to her, and to save her, if it’s not too late.
She starts seeing Abby everywhere and hearing her voice in her head. Pretty soon, other girls who disappeared when they were 17 start appearing to Lauren and telling her their stories.
Based on the synopsis, I thought this book was going to be about the tragedy of young girls who disappear, never to be found again. It is about that, but it’s also about mental illness.
Understandably, Lauren doesn’t tell anyone what she’s seeing or hearing because they’ll think she’s crazy. When she finally gives in and tells her mom, her mom does her best to help Lauren, but finally has her committed to the psych ward of the hospital when Lauren accidentally breaks the bathroom mirror and slices her wrist open. The reader understands Lauren wasn’t intentionally trying to hurt herself, but personally, I don’t think it matters. Once you start blacking out and doing things you can’t remember, you can’t be trusted not to hurt yourself or others, even accidentally.
So Lauren is committed and drugged, but she escapes to the summer camp Abby ran away from. One of the missing girls Lauren has been seeing says to light everything on fire, so Lauren does (and that part is absolutely an accurate portrayal of schizophrenia. Also Lauren has schizophrenia, but I’ll get to that later.)
In the course of setting this forest fire, Lauren sees a man enter one of the camp’s buildings, get some supplies, and leave. It turns out to be the same man she saw earlier when she first started investigating Abby’s disappearance. He told her he was a police officer, but he wasn’t. He had kidnapped Abby, and because Abby had run away once before, no one bothered to look for her, assuming she had run away again.
So Lauren’s not totally crazy? She had a feeling she couldn’t explain that Abby had not run away. That she was still alive, but she was in danger. And she turned out to be right.
That’s awesome, but the fact that Lauren was seeing things that weren’t there and hearing voices that were telling her what to do still needs to be dealt with. She hasn’t actually been diagnosed with schizophrenia because a diagnosis usually takes years, depending on the patient’s symptoms. We also learn Lauren’s absent father had schizophrenia, which Lauren’s mother had kept from her.
I don’t really know what to make of this story. I was all ready to believe Lauren was really seeing these girls because this is fiction and I love that kind of stuff in the books I read. I was kind of disappointed when her mom and the doctors turned out to be right. I think I didn’t like this book because it was trying to be too many things at once. You can either have a girl whose visions help her solve mysteries or a girl who needs to be committed because she sees and hears things that aren’t there. You can’t have both.
What did you guys read this week? Anything that failed to live up to your expectations? I want to hear all about!