#11 this week
Goodreads Choice Award Winner for Readers’ Favorite Mystery & Thriller (2024)
Book Blurb:
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2024
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST THRILLER OF 2024
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST CRIME NOVEL OF 2024
PEOPLE MAGAZINE’S #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR
A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY TOP 10 PICK OF 2024
ONE OF NPR’S “BOOKS WE LOVE” 2024
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S “100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024”
When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide
Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.
As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.
My Review:
Longer doesn’t always equate with better.
I’m the salmon battling up the river and over all the fish ladders as this novel appears to have done quite well and as usual I wasn’t all that thrilled.
While it started out with a hook and sparked my interest, the further I got into it, the less compelled I was to continue.
A seventeen-year-old girl disappears from summer camp and in the search for her the reader is introduced to myriad characters and their own POVs. Unfortunately, many times it is also the cause of timeline switches which disrupted the train of thought, derailed the plot line for me while I tried to digest the new time, the character in that time frame, and how they related to poor Barbara Van Laar whose family owns the camp.
Her brother disappeared from the same camp fourteen years previously. Yeah, now introduce a subplot. Why and how did he disappear?
What began as a nice pace became a slow burn, a mystery, that the longer the search, the more characters, timeline switches, and dysfunctional family memories are shared, the less I cared about any of them.
While there are some truly badass women, they are countered by milksops. My favorite character is TJ. She is smart, solid, and doesn’t let the money power behind the Van Laars lessen her authority. When it’s time for Alice’s POV (she is such a mess), I just want to slap her up the side of the head and tell her to shut up.
Well, are they ever going to find her? I don’t know—did you successfully navigate the twists and turns that lead nowhere? There is an interesting writing style, you can’t say the characters are not fully developed, but the atmosphere of the woods and the camp gets depressingly descriptive at times. Short chapters and slow passages kept me reading when I’d hit another interesting advance to the storyline. It was touch and go.
Perhaps better for you if you enjoy slow burn mysteries and character driven timeline switches. In any case, maybe that denouement will catch you by surprise. By that time though it just seems obvious.
I received an audiobook of this title from my local library that in no way influenced this review. These are my honest thoughts.
Rosepoint Rating: Four Stars 
Book Details:
Genre: Family Life Fiction, Literary Fiction, Psychological Thrillers
Publisher: Riverhead Books
ISBN-10: 0593418913
ISBN-13: 978-0593418918
ASIN: B0CL1YQLB5
Print Length: 490 pages
Publication Date: July 2, 2024
Source: Library
Title Link(s):
Amazon-US | Amazon-UK | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
The Author: Liz Moore is the author of five novels: The Words of Every Song, Heft, The Unseen World, the New York Times-bestselling Long Bright River, and The God of the Woods. A winner of the 2014 Rome Prize in Literature, she lives in Philadelphia and teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Temple University.
©2025 V Williams
Rosepoint Publishing 