Thursday, August 17, 2017

Everything We Lost

Everything We Lost by Valerie Geary
HarperCollins: 8/22/17
eBook review copy; 480 pages
ISBN-13: 9780062566423

Everything We Lost by Valerie Geary is a very highly recommended psychological thriller/coming-of-age family drama.

On December 5, 1999, sixteen-year-old Nolan Durant left his home in Bishop, California, with a backpack and several hundred dollars in cash. He never returned. Ten years later Lucy, his now twenty-four-year-old younger sister, has been kicked out of her father's house. This, along with an article her mother wrote, becomes the impetus she needs to set off back to Bishop where she will try to reconcile with her estranged mother, get answers, and confront her missing memories of Nolan and that night.

Although she and Nolan were close as children, as a fourteen-year-old Lucy became progressively distant and hostile toward Nolan. Nolan was increasingly becoming more and more fixated with UFOs.  He recorded his obsession in his casebook, a composition book where he noted his UFO sightings, strange happenings, and supporting information about the events. As Nolan's paranoid delusions increased, so did Lucy's distance from him.

Chapters alternate between the voices of Lucy today and Nolan in 1999. In the present day, Lucy returns to Bishop, reflecting on the past while trying to recover her missing memories and figure out what really happened to Nolan. In 1999 Nolan is the narrator. His chapters open with a section from his casebook notes and then tell his story from his point-of-view. It becomes steadily obvious that Nolan is suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness.

The writing is excellent. I was totally immersed in the story and anxiously read to find out what would happen next in the present as well as 1999. Both Lucy and Nolan are well-developed, believable characters. Present day Lucy is stuck in a rut and needs to find some kind of closure in order to move on with her life. Geary has accurately captured the cruelties of peer pressure, being an outcast, and trying to fit into high school cliques with Lucy and being an outsider and increasingly different with Nolan. Their totally inadequate ineffectual parents are equally well-developed. The way the three handle the uncertainty of Nolan's fate is an insightful look into their personalities.

I was captivated by Everything We Lost and anxious to read what happened next in both timelines. (I am actually surprised that more ratings aren't glowing about this fine novel. I can concede that the ending might disappoint some readers but I thought it was well done. I'll be anxiously awaiting Geary's next novel.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins.

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