HALF IN LOVE WITH DEATH

A girl experiences firsthand the clash between innocence and knowledge in a relatively innocent place and time: Tucson in the 1960s.

Jess is daring, confrontational, a rebel—everything her younger sister, Caroline, is not. But when Jess goes missing after sneaking out of the house, Caroline needs to know what happened. Maybe it's all because of Jess' unfinished request to Caroline before she left: “Would you.…” Amid a simplistic web of questions and evidence, suspicion of course falls on Jess' boyfriend, the magnetic, brooding Tony. Caroline wants to believe Tony's story, wants to believe him when Tony promises her that together they will go to California and find Jess. In a facile transformation, Caroline turns herself into Caro, a girl Tony's type, a girl like her older sister. Yet when the body of another missing girl is discovered—a girl who also had a connection with Tony—Caroline is left to wonder whom to trust: Tony or herself. Caroline’s narrative voice is flat and unconvincingly naïve, and together with the clumsy juxtaposition of Jess’ disappearance against continuing normalcy, it mutes the novel’s innate suspense. Tony is never convincing as the villain, and secondary characters fail to come to life.

Barely keeps the reader turning the pages until the lackluster ending.