Tuesday, August 27, 2013

17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma

Seventeen-year-old Lauren Woodman stops at a red light one day and sees an old flyer on a telephone pole asking for information about a missing 17-year old girl.  The assumption that Abigail Sinclair, the girl in question, is a runaway starts Lauren thinking about all the missing girls who are forgotten by their communities. Lauren begins to see visions of a former neighbor and babysitter who left home when she was 17 as well as glimpses of Abigail and her activities on the night she disappeared.   Ghostly images of the girls appear in her car, in her home and in her dreams.  Lauren starts to understand that there is something ominous about their individual stories;  clearly they did not all choose to leave home forever.  She knows she needs to do something to make the police and the girls' families more aware--to keep looking!

The suspense builds as Lauren puts herself in some pretty sketchy situations--visiting people related in one way or another to the missing girls and trespassing in a gloomy, isolated summer camp where Abby worked until, abruptly, she didn't.  Increasingly it becomes apparent that Lauren is obsessed and very troubled.  She breaks up with her boyfriend, shuts out her mother, avoids her former best friend, and starts skipping school. Lauren's voice as she tells her story is one of desperation--she knows she is losing the ability to distinguish between her visions and reality, but doesn't believe she can trust anyone to help her find out the truth about the girls who, through her, are crying for help.  As her relationships with her friends and family wither, her communications with the ghosts increase in frequency and power, telling Lauren what to do.  Lauren's struggles,  punctuated by the tragic stories of the missing teens, make this a definite page-turner.