Songs for the Missing

My latest gym book, Songs for the Missing by Stewart O'Nan, was an interesting follow up to Every Last One. Both dealt with family tragedies, but here the action got going a lot sooner. In the first ten pages or so, we meet high school senior Kim Larsen. And then, right around the tenth page, she goes missing. The rest of the book follows her parents and younger sister as they search for Kim and eventually have to move on with their own lives even though the mystery of her disappearance remains unsolved.

Where Every Last One was slow at the beginning, Song for the Missing needed about 50 pages or so (out of 287 total) cut out of the middle. A hundred pages of friends and family searching the rural landscape for clues was quite repetitive. But, the book raised some interesting questions about how families deal with a disappearance. What happens when Kim's younger sister goes back to school? What do Kim's parents tell the college she has chosen when the fall semester starts and she's still missing? When can they go back to work after spending all their time searching for their daughter?

This certainly wasn't my favorite book, but I kept reading to see if Kim would ever be found, and I'm glad I did keep reading. It was a really poignant portrait of a family caught in a tragedy and how they return to everyday life even when the case remains unsolved.