Riley feels so alone. She has just lost her father and has to clean out his home and she cannot count on her brother, Danny, to help. He has been through so much, having been wounded as a soldier in Iraq, and is still suffering the consequences. But as she begins to sift through her father’s papers, she uncovers evidence that her sister, who she understood to have died by suicide when she was 2 years old, may actually be alive. Needing to uncover the truth, she pursues this possibility, in spite of all the pressure she is experiencing from those around her to just get the job done.
Here is another quite suspenseful book, with unexpected twists and emotionally charged characters. As we feel the pressure Riley is under to get the house in order and ready to sell, we also feel for her as she digs up so much of her family’s past. Because she was so young when she lost her sister, she was relatively untouched by the loss, with the exception of the impact it had on the family who remained. Her mother was distant, her brother was deeply angry, and her father was kind but distracted as well. We thoroughly understand how Riley came to be a counselor for middle school students, trying to prevent for them what happened to her own sister.
We also question, along with Riley, whom she can trust. Can she trust the real estate agent who has been pressuring her to get through her father’s things so they can put the house up for sale? Or her father’s old friend, who lives in her father’s trailer park and whose wife keeps dropping hints about her family’s secrets? We even doubt, along with Riley, whether she can trust her own brother, whom she adores but worries about his volatile personality.
While mostly plot-driven, with all the family secrets being at its heart, I feel the characters are also deeply sympathetic. Jade, in particular, is one we feel for; forced to live a lie, looking over her shoulder for so many years. We feel her terror, her unease with anything suggesting publicity. But we also feel her yearning, her love for her music that brings her the only joy she thinks she’ll ever experience.
I definitely recommend this book as a suspenseful, twisty page-turner!
kindread spirits 