When She Was Gone

Tom Perotta's Little Children meets Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones in this suspenseful and beautifully wrought story of a seventeen-year-old girl who vanishes on the eve of her departure for college, as told through the alternating perspectives of her neighbors. W hat happened to Linsey Hart? When the Cornell-bound teenager disappears into the steamy blue of a late-summer morning, her quiet neighborhood is left to pick apart the threads of their own lives and assumptions. Linsey's neighbors are just ordinary people—but even ordinary people can keep terrible secrets hidden close. There's Linsey's mother, Abigail, whose door-to-door searching makes her social-outcast status painfully obvious; Mr. Leonard, the quiet, retired piano teacher with insomnia, who saw Linsey leave; Reeva, the queen bee of a clique of mothers, now obsessed with a secret interest; Timmy, Linsey's lovelorn ex-boyfriend; and George, an eleven-year-old loner who is determined to find out what happened to his missing neighbor. As the days of Linsey's absence tick by, dread and hope threaten to tear a community apart. This luminous new novel by the acclaimed author of The Orphan Sister explores coming of age in the shadows of a suburban life, and what is revealed when the light suddenly shines in. . . . Tom Perottas Little Children meets Alice Sebolds The Lovely Bones in this suspenseful and beautifully wrought story of a seventeen-year-old girl who vanishes on the eve of her departure for college, as told through the alternating perspectives of her neighbors. Seventeen-year-old Linsey Hart disappears the day before shes due to leave for college. As her neighbors piece together what they saw and what they think they know about the missing girl, their long-held secrets, prejudices, and entanglements become rudely evident. Theres Linseys mother, Abigail, whose door-to-door searching makes her social outcast status painfully obvious; stay-at-home mom Reeva, whose primary concern is covering up the affair shes been having with the Starbucks barista; Mr. Leonard, a reclusive retired piano teacherand the last person to see Linsey alive; George, an eleven year-old gifted loner who is determined to find out what happened to Linsey; and Timmy, Linseys ex-boyfriend, who is left grieving as he embarks on his own college career. A keenly observed portrait of a small town under duress, When She Was Gone is a searing portrayal of the bonds that hold a community togetherand the secrets and lies that threaten to rip it apart. Just before she’s supposed to start her freshman year at college, Linsey Hart goes missing. Her absence rocks the insular commuter community, whose hypocritical residents publicly wonder how such a thing could happen, while privately disdaining the people and events at the center of Linsey’s life. Her neighbor, Mr. Leonard, muses about Linsey’s disappearance as he plays Rachmaninoff nocturnes while wearing his deceased mother’s evening gown. George, an 11-year-old social misfit, surreptitiously photographs the town’s denizens, searching for clues as to Linsey’s whereabouts. Randy, middle-aged soccer mom Reeva mourns the loss of Linsey as a babysitter for her autistic son, but not to the point where it interferes with her affair with Jordan, a Starbucks barista half her age. Meanwhile, Linsey’s ex-boyfriend Timmy and her mother, Abigail, each grapple with self-recriminations over their roles in driving Linsey away. Gross’ canny twist on the missing-child trope is less a taunting mystery than a caustic indictment of the superficiality of suburban mores and morals. When seventeen-year-old Linsey Hart disappears, her entire neighborhood confronts long-buried secrets and prejudices as her social outcast mother goes door-to-door in search of her missing daughter.