Book Review: Missing by Savannah Brown

Seventeen-year-old Mona Perry is a girl on a mission. It’s the summer after high school graduation and she knows that this is the best, and perhaps only, time she’ll ever have in which to investigate the disappearance of up-and-coming singer Roxy Raines.

Thirty years ago, young Roxy abruptly vanished after a headlining gig in her hometown. The year-round residents of the resort island of Sandown had assumed that the troubled young girl had become just another teenage runaway. They’d closed ranks whenever outsiders tried to find out more, in hopes that stonewalling would allow the whole thing to die down. Alas for the Sandowners, the reissue of Roxy’s songs online kept interest in her case alive long after she’d gone missing.

Armed with podcasting gear and a cover story, Mona is determined to get to the truth once and for all. She has some experience with investigating this kind of thing, after all:

I’ve been writing and presenting the podcast since freshman year. Three years of half-hour segments, all fully committed to documenting someone else’s life and all the ways a life can pause. I’m definitely not the only one doing what I do, but I like to think that where some people are gimmicky, I’m respectful; where some people are careless, I’m thorough. I like to think this. I’m not a half-bad writer, and given my personal experience with missing people, I do my best to marry antisensationalism with viscerality.

Called “How To Disappear,” the podcast is surprisingly successful, even despite Mona’s decision to remain anonymous in presenting it. She has her own reasons for operating under a pseudonym, not least of which is her desire to fly under the radar while actively investigating. This works in her favor, at least at first, when she reaches Sandown and attempts to integrate herself into the island’s summer life.

As expected, the locals who were present at the time of Roxy’s disappearance prove less than helpful, if not outright hostile. Mona quickly finds allies, though, in a Sandown teenager named Ellis, as well as in her new roommate Peyton. But the more she investigates, the more she’s forced to confront her own motives, especially when they involve lying to people she’s begun to care about. In a harrowing spiral of emotions, her guilt and fear soon cause her to push aside her moral qualms, as she’s taken over by a mania to uncover the truth before anything as mundane as common sense can stop her.

Because Mona’s interest in the missing girl isn’t just about the case, or even about finding material for the podcast. Mona’s compulsion to dissect unsolved disappearances is, in fact, rooted deeply in her own trauma, after she lost another teenager, a girl named Celeste:

After you are hollowed out by suffering, you might expect something to rush in to fill the new, unoccupied parts of yourself, but that’s not how it’s been for me. Nothing rushed in. Instead, I sometimes look in the mirror and see not a different person but no one at all. Not a canvas. A canvas has potential, a promise, an ability. I see nothing. I’m no one.

 

But the stories are always there. Celeste’s absence is always there. Roxy Raines is always there. This is what’s left of me. The ignition and flame and ash, all at once. I’ve decided the only way to make it all count and fill what’s empty is to find her.

Driven by her need to find answers, Mona will risk everything to uncover the truth. But what will she do when finding what she thought she so desperately wanted means giving up the very ideas of herself she’s clung to for so long?

Savannah Brown’s Missing is a truly devastating psychological portrait of a teenager whose emotional growth has been stunted by trauma, and whose attempts to compensate have only made her more brittle with time. Mona is a compelling heroine who does terrible, unlikeable things, but whom I still couldn’t help but root for as she searches for a solution that will bring meaning to a life that desperately lacks it.

Ms. Brown is also a poet, and it shows in her stunning prose. The external clarity she brings to Mona’s tortured interior life provides a valuable window into the torments of adolescence, even before focusing on a psyche damaged and left unmended after experiencing unspeakable pain. The author’s elegant examination of how unresolved trauma warps a person, and the ongoing harm of misanthropy, makes for unusual but substantive reading in the thriller genre, Young Adult or otherwise.