PRESENT, STILL MISSING

In Mach’s historical novel, a young girl’s father returns home from World War II a changed man.

As the story opens, a young girl named Irene Bracken is riding with her mother in a borrowed car to meet Irene’s father, a soldier returning from the Second World War. Irene is excited, as are all of those gathered waiting for a loved one to return, and her father is warmly embraced by his family and his little town of Midland Valley. But it isn’t long before cracks begin to appear: The persona of the cheerful and easy-going Daddy Irene remembers increasingly seems like an act Mr. Bracken is trying to maintain, and underneath this mask is an angry and frightened man, someone whose experiences in the war have wounded him in invisible ways. While the narrative largely follows Irene as she goes about the normal activities of a young girl in a small town, it also returns regularly to the unavoidable reality that Mr. Bracken is fighting an inner battle—and largely losing it. “We’d have been better off if he’d never come home,” Irene’s friend MaryEllen says at one point about her own ex-soldier father. “At least then Momma would have a check from the gov’ment.” Irene’s worries reach a peak when her father opts for electroshock therapy, and Mach’s decision to narrate these tense and dark events from the perspective of a young girl ends up paying off wonderfully. Irene is innocent but tough (“I hope he feels the sear of my gaze,” she thinks about a boy in her class who’s just assumed the class girls won’t play in the upcoming baseball game, “because I am ready to broil him in hot flames”); readers will immediately bond with and relate to her, even when she’s privately her suffering father’s harshest critic.

An engaging and moving novel about the emotional toll warfare takes on both soldiers and their families.