Reviewed by Jeanne
Twenty years ago, a neighborhood vanished. The houses, the people, everything—gone,
hidden behind some sort of barrier. The only survivors were three young women
who were away from their homes when the disappearance happened. Despite the researchers and the
investigators, the conspiracy theorists and the occult believers, no one has been
able to explain what occurred at Velkwood.
One of the survivors, Talitha, has been running from what
happened for all those years. She’s
adrift, barely scraping by, and always haunted by her past. She’s approached by Jack, a researcher who
wants her to try to go back to the neighborhood—and he’s willing to pay. One of the three girls, Grace, actually did
go through the barrier once, but she won’t talk about it. Brett, Talitha’s former best friend, has
refused to try, not that Talitha really talks to her anymore. Or to Grace.
But Talitha left something precious behind in that
neighborhood: her younger sister,
Sophie. If there’s any chance that
Sophie is there, any chance that she can be rescued, then Talitha is going to
try.
I picked this up because of the intriguing premise. It’s well written and the hidden reasons
behind the vanishing are powerful and memorable. It’s appropriately creepy for
the season. The ghost people in the
neighborhood are well described but they’re also sort of standard issue
characters. My biggest problem is that I
never quite connected to the characters: Talitha, our narrator, is very closed off emotionally
and tightly wound. She doesn’t let people get close to her, and for me that
included the reader. None of the
characters came to life for me. It’s not
a bad book, and it does have important things to say, but as far as I’m
concerned it didn’t live up to its promise.
Every book is not for every
reader, and the very positive reviews others have given it are proof of
that. It just wasn’t a book for me.
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