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ISLAND OF LOST GIRLS by Jennifer McMahon
On Sale: April 22nd
Paperback
272 pages
ISBN-10: 0061445886
ISBN-13: 9780061445880
Rhonda, recently out of college and on her way to a job interview, is sitting in her blue Honda at a gas station when she sees someone in a rabbit suit kidnap a young girl out of car nearby. The absurdity of the rabbit suit has her momentarily perplexed, keeping her from stopping the crime. The guilt she feels from her inaction propels her to help with the investigation. But as she gets closer and closer to finding out who the kidnapper is, she also gets closer to uncovering the truth behind the disappearance of, Lizzy, her childhood best friend who went missing when they were young girls. As she revisits her past and is in a race to find the kidnapper in the present, old romances are rekindled, people from her past turn out to be different that what they seemed, and redemption is found for a long lost friend.
Jennifer McMahon is the author of PROMISE NOT TO TELL. She grew up in suburban Connecticut, and graduated from Goddard College in 1991. Over the years, she has been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and has worked with mentally ill adults and children in a few different capacities. Currently, she lives in Vermont with her partner, Drea, and their daughter, Zella.
Rhonda Farr, 23 years old and on her way to a job interview in her Vermont hometown of Pike's Crossing, stops at Pat's Mini Mart ostensibly to fill her gas tank. In actuality, she is hoping to run into Peter, the childhood friend she has always loved. Peter works in Pat's garage, and seeing him there beats having to endure the frustrating experience of viewing him in the bosom of his happy family, including his wife, Tock, and his little girl, Suzy. At the gas pump, though, Pat's husband Jim informs Rhonda that Peter took the day off.
Trudy Florucci pulls up to the store, leaving her second-grade daughter, Ernie, in the car listening to music. Jim runs into the store to wait on Trudy. As her gas tank fills, Rhonda nervously anticipates her job interview. She's distracted when a gold Volkswagen Beetle pulls up; she knows the vehicle belongs to Peter's mother-in-law, who continually gloats over how happy Tock is with Peter. Rhonda sinks down into her seat, hoping to remain unnoticed. But then the VW driver door opens and a giant white rabbit steps out.
The rabbit hops, jerking its head, and almost appears to be looking at Rhonda with its big plastic eyes. It nods at Rhonda and hops over to Trudy's car, knocking on the window behind which Ernie sits. Ernie smiles at the big rabbit, rolling her window down to touch it. Then she unbuckles her seatbelt, takes the rabbit's paw in her own hand, and walks with it over to the gold VW where she gets into the passenger's seat. Rhonda just gapes as the Volkswagen drives off.
Soon, though, Rhonda is explaining to the police why she did nothing as someone in a rabbit suit abducted a little girl. It's hard to explain, even to herself. She would describe herself as a practical, active person who always knows what to do in any situation, but for some reason she had felt mesmerized by the white rabbit. Understandably, Trudy is beside herself. She can't imagine who would take her little girl, or why. She even accuses Rhonda of being involved in the kidnapping. Meanwhile, law enforcement officials search the area while the store's owner efficiently sets up a search center.
Rhonda can't help but remember another person in a white rabbit suit, back when she and Peter were younger. Lizzy, Peter's sister and Rhonda's best friend, was also there. Peter and Lizzy's father, Daniel, had been the one in the suit, helping the children collect Easter eggs. But that was before the kids put on the play "Peter Pan" and Daniel mysteriously vanished, followed years later by Lizzy. Although Lizzy then sent postcards home to tell her mother and brother that she had joined her father, questions about their abrupt disappearances and Lizzy's frequent odd behavior have niggled away at Rhonda for years. Now, as she discovers clues that she believes will lead her to Ernie's kidnapper, she also grapples with understanding those long-ago mysteries, even as she strikes up her first true romantic relationship with Warren, Pat's nephew and a fellow volunteer at the search center for Ernie.
A heartbreaking and haunting masterpiece, this book teases readers with an almost painfully slow unveiling of puzzle piece clues. The atmosphere is dark and sinister while the plot twists and turns and tantalizes. Author Jennifer McMahon's understated writing packs an emotion-laden wallop. I can count on one hand how many times any book has truly frightened me, but ISLAND OF LOST GIRLS caused my heart to race and my breath to catch. I was afraid to keep turning pages, yet couldn't resist reaching the conclusion where the puzzle pieces finally fit together, forming an unpredictable and satisfying ending.
--- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon
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Prologue
June 24, 2006
"DIVE, DIVE, DIVE!" shouted Suzy as she clutched the old Chevy's cracked red-and-white steering wheel, jerking it back and forth in her hands, yanking hard on the turn signal lever to bring the ship down.
She knew it was air that made submarines rise and fall, just as she knew what she would see underwater: the octopus, the coral reef, the toothy smiles of sharks as they came in for the attack. She'd been a thousand times, and it was just like in the song her mother sang, about the octopus's garden in the shade. But on her way to the garden, there were sharks to run from, enemy subs trying to torpedo her. She knew what it was like to go down into blackness.
Suzy had these spells, like thunderstorms inside her head --- that's how her parents explained it --- where she'd black out, thrash around, and wake up confused. Seizures. Storms in her brain. Thunder and lightning. She wore a silver bracelet with her name and a weird red picture of a twisted-up snake on one side, the word epilepsy on the other. She took medicine, tiny pills each day.
Suzy was not supposed to play near the old car or the pile of rotten boards out behind her grandma's house. She knew that once people rode around in the Impala with its white stripe along the side; once the bumpers had sparkled and shown re?ections of the open road. The radio had worked then too. The engine had hummed. They had pulled the white top up when it rained, some kind of fancy umbrella.
Now, her parents warned her not to play there: It's dangerous, her parents told her. You could get hurt. Don't play there. But that old car called her, the octopus called her, the mice that lived in the hole in the seat called her. The little mouse babies, pink and blind, that squeaked and lived in a nest of straw between the rusted springs, called out to her, a chorus of high-pitched voices singing through nubs of tiny orange teeth. She'd pulled back the torn red-and-white seat cover and seen them wriggle like the tips of ?ngers. She brought snacks for the mama mouse: pieces of American cheese, peanut butter crackers, birdseed stolen from Nana Laura Lee's bird feeder.
Suzy knew what mice liked. And this was not just any mouse. This was the secret-underwater-periscope-up-?rst-of?cer mama mouse who was friends with the octopus, who told her how to outwit the sharks, who had pushed seven wormy babies out from inside her. The baby mice squeaked louder as they dove deeper into the sea, the water dark as ink around them.
Suzy pushed back her thick blond curls, the heavy ringlets, and squinted through the cracked windshield, out the side portholes. Nana Laura Lee, her mom's mama, called Suzy "Shirley Temple" and spent hours fussing with the girl's hair. She bought her ribbons and bows, sweet little dresses that Suzy promptly got caught on prickers and barbed wire, ripping them until they were only good enough for doll bandages or Indian headbands.
But this afternoon's game was dive down and have tea in the octopus's garden before her daddy came looking for her. So down she dove, running from sharks the whole way.
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