Sixteen-year-old Melissa Sprague has a lot on her mind: The A-bomb. Acid rain. Where her dad’s been hiding out for the last fifteen years. Mel’s younger sister, Lora, knows that despite her sister’s talent for misery, Mel’s preoccupations aren’t unusual. But when Mel vanishes, what were the preoccupations of a teenage girl are taken up as evidence, casting questions over Mel’s disappearance. Lora knows that someone has taken her sister and it was not a stranger who took her. In a narrative both gutsy and intimate, Anne Stone draws us deep into Lora’s world, reminding us what it is to be that young and lucid, that vulnerable to a world so much bigger than ourselves.

Anne Stone is a contributing editor at Matrix magazine. She has written two other novels: jacks: a gothic gospel and Hush. She lives in Vancouver.