THE VAN APFEL GIRLS ARE GONE :: Felicity McLean

A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness and is reprinted here with permission.

"They're kids, for heaven's sake. What have they got to be fearful of?" Perhaps more than anyone knew. In 1992, sisters Ruth, Hannah and Cordie Van Apfel disappeared during Tikka Malloy's skit in their school's Showstopper production. Twenty years later, Tikka returns to Australia to face her sister Laura's lymphoma diagnosis and her own decades-long haunting.

Tikka and Laura knew things they didn't tell in 1992. What Tikka knew, or thought she knew, has gnawed at and unsettled her ever since, with false Cordie sightings continuous as a tic. The detective told them to "sit tight"--he would find their friends. But Tikka can no longer sit tight, compelled to address the past and whether her family did enough to help their neighbors.

Australian journalist Felicity McLean's The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is a well-layered puzzle with unexplained pieces to spare. At the core of this gripping debut novel are the uncertain perceptions of young Tikka and 2012 Tikka, still partially trapped in her 11-year-old self.

McLean's often striking prose swirls deftly between the two Tikkas as suspicions begin to emerge--about the Van Apfels and their violently pious patriarch, Cordie's broken arm, and the school's first male teacher. A slow burn that maintains an electric current of dread, the narrative is also cleverly colored by the underpinning of the infamous Chamberlain case. Although more than 30 years later it was confirmed that Lindy Chamberlain's baby was indeed snatched by a dingo, the Van Apfel girls may get no such closure.

STREET SENSE: Fans of ambiguous mysteries will dig this one. I love an author who has the guts to leave questions unanswered, or at least up for interpretation. There is some beautiful writing here, and I loved young Tikka's relationship with her father.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  I'm a sucker for writers who can pull off a long passage and a quick, down-and-dirty beaut. Some of my favorites by McLean contain spoilers, but here are a couple of safe bits:

Then Mr. Van Apfel appeared, stepping forward with his arms outstretched and his palms to the sky as if coming in from the Lord’s outfield.

They had six femurs, ninety-nine vertebrae, three skulls and thirty fingernails. Six kneecaps, forty-eight carpal bones, and more than three million strands of blonde hair, all tinged alien-green by the chlorine in their pool which, up until the day they went missing, we’d swum in almost every single day that summer. And yet all these things vanished—just evaporated in the heat. Not a single sign was left for us.

It was a ganglion, Macedon Close. A ganglion. (I got “ganglion” from our extension spelling list in week five of term two, back when we did “The Human Body.”) That’s what our cul-de-sac was: a lump that grows in some place it shouldn’t and nobody’s really sure why.

COVER NERD SAYS:  I was attracted to this cover the instant I saw it, despite never having been a big pink person. I'm not even sure when I sat and tried to figure out the image in the font, or how long it took me. The image is there if you look, but the girl has really disappeared into the font, just like the Van Apfel sisters. Clean and striking, this cover does a great job with a title that could be tricky, and thankfully didn't fall prey to the overused theme of girls/women seen from behind running into dark woods, which could easily have been done here. Kudos.