In a clothing shop at a local mall, Jesse Albright turns away from her ten-year-old daughter, Sophie, for a moment. When she turns back, she finds that Sophie has vanished, as if into thin air.
Six years later, as this gripping and affecting novel begins, Sophie is still nowhere to be found, and authorities have all but given up on the search for her. But Jesse hasn’t. Although almost everything about Jesse’s life has changed–she’s withdrawn from friends and neighbors, split with Sophie’s father, Cooper, and taken to drinking heavily–she continues to hold out hope that Sophie might be alive, somewhere. And in what Cooper and others see as hoarding caused by grief, Jesse fills the home she once shared with him and Sophie with found objects, seeing them as clues that Sophie has sent her to decipher.
Sophie’s bedroom remains as she’d left it, decorated with a mural of birds that Jesse had painted under the direction of her daughter, for whom bird watching was not a hobby but an obsession, and who rarely went anywhere without her binoculars.
Also traumatized by Sophie’s disappearance is a teenaged girl named Star, once Sophie’s best friend. In the form of a ghost, hallucination, or dream, Sophie has started appearing to Star and provoking her, as if urging her friend not to forget her, to keep looking for her. These appearances exacerbate Star’s feelings of loss, and her guilt over declining to go the mall with Sophie on the day of her disappearance. Because of the guilt and sadness she feels in connection to Sophie, Star has become nearly as withdrawn as Jesse, and she’s taken to cutting herself to try to lessen her pain.
Complicating the grief of Jesse and Star, and compounding their guilt, is that Sophie wasn’t easy to love, or to have as a friend. As a result, Jesse and Star often became frustrated with her. As Jesse observes of Sophie:
The search for Sophie takes a new turn when a private investigator, Kentucky Marcus Barnes, arrives in town, searching for a missing girl whose case might or might not be connected to Sophie’s. Because he has had to cope with the loss of his own daughter, to leukemia, Barnes feels a special connection to Jesse, and as he becomes more involved in the search for Sophie, he and Jesse form an emotional and romantic bond.
Later on, clues about a man who might have been involved in Sophie’s disappearance surface in a bird-watching journal that she kept while on a Cape Cod vacation with her family and Star’s. This discovery leads Jesse and Star to bridge the distance between them that set in after Sophie went missing, and together, they travel to the Cape to follow clues from the journal and see if they might uncover new information.
Although the relationship between Jesse and Star remains fraught, the two of them form a new kind of bond as they search for Sophie, each woman extending to the other a degree of compassion and understanding that, for years, she hadn’t been able to offer to herself.
In this sense and others, the emotional dimensions of the book are as captivating as the mystery at the heart of it. As compelling as Jesse and Star’s mission to learn what happened to Sophie is the long, harrowing journey that the two women take to come to terms with what they did–and didn’t do–on the day of Sophie’s disappearance, and to cope with her absence from their lives. As she leads readers through this journey, Adelstein movingly portrays the powers of friendship, forgiveness, and renewal.
Furthermore, Adelstein compassionately conveys the stresses and difficulties of trying to be a patient and loving parent to a persistently challenging child, shedding welcome light on a situation that, to my mind, isn’t often explored in fiction, where missing children may simply be figures to be longed for or mourned, rather than fully realized characters. Jesse’s and Star’s feelings about Sophie are loving yet complicated, making the story of her disappearance and absence, and of the efforts to find her, all the richer and more nuanced.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":▪ Mysteries or crime fiction
▪ Stories about coping with loss or grief
▪ Stories of mother-daughter relationships or parenting
