I don't normally read books like this, but the setting intrigued me as well as the storyline. Just where did these children go? What happened to them?
This book takes place in a community...well, a dead community. The chemical plant that was once so promising that brought big business to this small town and employed most of its inhabitants had turned this town into a toxic waste site, leaving its workers and inhabitants sick.
As the plant shuts down, people lose their jobs. People become sick. The woods become a toxic waste littered with what once had been. Strange creatures changed by the chemical plant's pollutants creep within its borders.
All in the midst of this dead community is a struggle to survive, waiting for the moment...any moment to be free of the dead world around them. People leave. Children disappear. People die.
Wait...why are the children disappearing? What's happening to them? Why are the police not searching for them? Why don't the residents care that their own children are missing?
One child...the police know for a fact...he was killed. The policeman was, after all, the person that found him, but then buried him to cover up the fact that a child was murdered. What about the other boys that went missing? Were they also murdered or did they just run away?
These are all questions you ask as you go through this story. It is a part coming of age book about a teenager struggling in this dead community, dealing with his mother leaving him with his sick father, struggling to find something meaningful in this messed up community, and dealing with the death (or did he go missing?) of his best friend...never knowing if he is the next child on the list to go missing.
In the Amazon reviews, the reviewer mentions that his friend called this book "a sleeper." "It creeps up on you." What she meant by that is that even after you finish the very last word in the book, you think...that's all there was? That's nothing.
Then as you churn the book over in your mind days or weeks later you realize just how haunting the book really was. It stays with you.
I picked up this book on a suggestion from Oprah.com. After reading the book, I had to sit back and ask if the person at Oprah.com actually read the book, because it's a very strange book for Oprah to recommend. I don't even think Oprah would read a book like this.
Why would you read it? Because for some odd reason, this haunting tale means something to you, you just don't know what it is...then you realize it's a reflection of yourself and what you've lost as you moved on through this lifetime.
That, of course, you don't figure out until long after you've closed the cover on the book.
xxoo,
Michelle
