YA horror | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Book Review: Vanishing Girls by Lauren Oliver

HarperCollins, 2015

ISBN-13: 978-0062224101

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

Young adult fiction has been getting darker and more realistic with each year. Lauren Oliver has been at the helm for much of it, beginning with Before I Fall and followed by the immensely successful Delirium series. While dystopian YA has been the main thrust of the genre for years, culminating with The Hunger Games and Divergent, teens also have been clamoring for something more personal.

Oliver has delivered both over the past the few years and with Vanishing Girls, has hit it out of the park with an unsettling, dark tale that will resonate with the reader long after the book is closed. She knows teens well, how they speak, act, and think. It shows on the page in a brisk read that will fly by.

The book begins with notes from a therapist which immediately suggests things will not be as they appear. Sisters Dara and Nick have always been close, sharing their worlds. Nick is the quieter, reserved sibling, while Dara’s wild side tends to be well explored They are competing for a common love interest: Parker, the boy next door, who lends a natural tension to the story. A car accident shreds their relationship and much more when Dara is left facially disfigured, and shuns her sister. What ensues is a jump down the rabbit hole, in which the reader is twisted and turned through phases of reality. The characters are more complex than those typically found in YA fiction, and face issues that teens do face, ignoring any sugarcoating.

Nick takes a job at a local amusement park, which brings her into another world, showing what happens behind the bright lights, and after the midway and rides shut down. Just as the reader might think the story is becoming a romance, the dark sets in, as a young girl goes missing. As Nick delves into the mystery of the missing girl, Dara disappears.

Oliver builds suspense steadily, and keeps the plot unpredictable, drawing on the complexity of the characters. The ending is satisfying and completely worth the wait. Oliver has crafted a near perfect thriller, and her writing improves with each subsequent book.

Recommended for middle school and high school libraries, for mature teens and older, Vanishing Girls, in addition to being a great thriller, can be an excellent learning experience about mental illness for many and show others that they’re not dealing with the issues alone.

Angry Penguins, Anne Rice Returns, and Other Stuff.

Well, the drama from November, when Penguin pulled all their ebook titles from OverDrive (read: libraries) for dealing with Amazon, and then later decided it was okay for libraries to continue to check out ebooks they had already purchased but not new releases while they negotiated, has concluded for the moment, with Penguin choosing to stop releasing new ebooks to libraries at all and any Kindle versions to libraries at all. Instead of me summing it all up for you, I now present you with further reading: an article from Publishers Weekly that provides a basic summary, and some more information here. A bit of analysis shows that while this is extremely frustrating for librarians and library users, it probably doesn’t do either Penguin or Overdrive much good, since it appears that now the only Big Six publisher making ebooks available to libraries is Random House, even though there is a huge demand for ebooks. So if you’re a small press publisher, willing to make it easy for libraries to work with you, this could be good news for you.

And a few tie ins to Women in Horror Month (kinda):

Anne Rice is back, this time with a werewolf book. Here’s an interview with her, published just a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal.

And this month Madeline L’ Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. You can argue that it’s science fiction or fantasy or both, and you’d be right, but it’s also terrifying. I liked this article that talked about how central women writers have been to the renaissance of science fiction and fantasy, especially for the young adult crowd. The author mentions extremely cool writers like Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Lois Lowry, all of whom came long before J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins ever hit the scene. Although it’s not addressed in the article, if you look at YA horror, I suspect you’ll find a number of women writers there too; Lois Duncan and V.C. Andrews were staples when I was growing up (although not as likely to be assigned reading in school). It’s interesting to note this, as these are frequently perceived as male-dominated genres… does that just happen when we grow up?

And Rose Fox, over at Genreville, notes that there are more starred horror titles (horror-ish, to use her exact wording) this year already than there were all last year. Woohoo!