Vanishing Girls - Lauren Oliver

New York Times bestselling author Lauren Oliver delivers a gripping story about two sisters inexorably altered by a terrible accident.

Dara and Nick used to be inseparable, but that was before the accident that left Dara's beautiful face scarred and the two sisters totally estranged. When Dara vanishes on her birthday, Nick thinks Dara is just playing around. But another girl, nine-year-old Madeline Snow, has vanished, too, and Nick becomes increasingly convinced that the two disappearances are linked. Now Nick has to find her sister, before it's too late.

In this edgy and compelling novel, Lauren Oliver creates a world of intrigue, loss, and suspicion as two sisters search to find themselves, and each other.

 

This is definitely Oliver's best book since Before I Fall, and I had trouble putting it down.

 

This was a mystery, a thriller, and a book with some psychological elements all mixed in. It had an exciting plot with quite a few threads going on that tied together quite nicely.

 

My favourite aspect of this book was the tension and the creepiness that hovered over me the whole time I was reading it. Even when I was lying on the grass reading it in the sun, I felt like there was a cloud hanging over me and tension was consuming me--there was just the aura that something bad was around every corner.

 

It actually reminded me from the first few chapters of Ellen Hopkins' Identical and because of that perhaps this book was less intense than it could have been.


The way Oliver weaved Nick's point of view in with newspaper articles, diary entries, text messages, chapters from the past, and other various pieces was very clever and well organized, adding without being distracting.

 

I really loved Nick. Even though I kept thinking she was Parker due to my horrible memory for names mixed with the stereotypically male nickname for Nicole. She was really well rounded, and though people--Dara especially--thought she seemed perfect, it was very apparent that there were cracks and that she herself could see them.

Some scenes, once knowing everything, were incredibly perfect and used the very clever diction I admire Oliver for.

 

Oliver has crafted a really clever book and while it was nowhere as strong as her writing in Before I Fall, I'm excited to see what she comes up with next.