(seriously-the woman is a MASTER of ensuring that you're on the edge of your seat.)īest of all, she writes about friendship and family and always includes POC and queer side characters, and i love her so much for it, the way she interweaves diversity into her speculative fiction without ever being didactic. it flows seamlessly from horror to horror, cliffhanger to cliffhanger. Yet her prose is rife with vivid descriptions and compelling metaphors-non-clichés i never see this side of YA. i laughed at their jokes, related to their crushes and growing pains. every scene is permeated by the atmospheric and deeply unsettling sense of 'something is very, very wrong.' on top of this, marshall writes authentic YA i felt like i was reading a story about 21st century teenagers. these are characters you can't help but root for. our last echoes definitely reminded me of rules for vanishing in that sense. Kate alice marshall is one of my favourite authors, ever, for good reason.Įver since i read-no, devoured- rules for vanishing last october, i've been obsessed with her prose. Even if it leads her to a truth she may not want to face. When it looks like their two mysteries might be one and the same, Sophia vows to dig up the truth, no matter how many lies she has to tell along the way. People have been vanishing from Bitter Rock for decades, leaving only their ghostly echoes behind. There, she meets the disarmingly clever Liam, whose own mother runs the LARC, as well as Abby, who's following a mystery of her own: a series of unexplained disappearances. Or so she has been told her whole life.Ī series of clues have led Sophia to the island of Bitter Rock, Alaska, where she talked her way into a summer internship at the Landon Avian Research Center, the same center her mother worked at right before she died. And her mother died years ago in a hospital. She remembers her mother pulling her to safety before disappearing forever. She remembers the cold shock of going under. She remembers the darkness of the water and the briny taste as it fills her throat.

A supernatural thriller about one girl's hunt for the truth about her mother's disappearance.

Thirteens kate alice marshall