Everybody knows everybody in The Hollows, a quaint, charming town outside of New York City. It's a place where neighbors keep an eye on one another's kids, where people say hello in the grocery store, and where high school cliques and antics are never quite forgotten. As a child, Maggie found living under the microscope of small-town life stifling. But as a wife and mother, she has happily returned to The Hollows's insular embrace. As a psychologist, her knowledge of family histories provides powerful insights into her patients' lives. So when the girlfriend of her teenage son, Rick, disappears, Maggie's intuitive gift proves useful to the case--and also dangerous. The investigation has her husband, Jones, the lead detective on the case, acting strangely. Rick, already a brooding teenager, becomes even more withdrawn. In a town where the past is always present, nobody is above suspicion, not even a son in the eyes of his father. Determined to uncover the truth, Maggie pursues her own leads into Charlene's disappearance and exposes a long-buried town secret--one that could destroy everything she holds dear.
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0 0It has been a long time since I have read something so suspenseful that I could not put it down, but Fragile by Lisa Unger is the kind of book that sucks you in and won’t let you go. It is reminiscent of Jodi Picoult’s earlier work with just the right balance of suspense and mystery to keep a reader enchanted until the final page. I must say that I am smitten with Lisa Unger and can’t wait to read some of her older novels now that I have had a taste of her writing style.
In the town of The Hollows, a fictional small town just outside of New York City, a young girl goes missing after a fight with her parents. The disappearance reminds the people in this town of another similar disappearance of a girl named Sarah, who had suddenly disappeared in the eighties, and many of the main characters find themselves flashing back to that first disappearance.
While the main characters are revisiting the disappearance of Sarah, they are also desperately trying to find the current girl who has disappeared. Charlene is a bit of a rebel-child and born to a family from the wrong side of the tracks. She is the girlfriend of Ricky, who is the child of Jones ( a cop) and Maggie (a psychologist) on the other side of the tracks, yet Ricky has no idea where Charlene has gone even though he loves Charlene.
When Charlene posts a status update on her Facebook page that she has left for New York City, Ricky and his friends are suspicious that someone has logged into her account because the status update sounds nothing like something Charlene would write. They began to fear the worst as the clues are uncovered and there are a cast of suspects that could have taken Charlene.
With Charlene gone, the clock is ticking to find her and bring her back to her family. Unfortunately, there are many suspects, but few clues as to where she could have gone. The reader is taken along on the journey as they try to uncover what has happened to Charlene as it is told through the eyes of everyone from the cop on the case, the psychologist whose family is battling their own demons, through the eyes of a troubled child, and even an exterminator who happens to have witnessed a few clues of his own to help the case.
While there are many characters, the plot somehow flows seamlessly as each person shares their innermost secrets and does not create confusion for the reader. Through these characters, the reader can begin to piece together both disappearances for a surprising twist that will bring the two stories colliding together, reminding us how small the world is and how intertwined our stories can be.
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