Book Notices | The Missing by Caroline Eriksson / The Chemist by Stephenie Meyer

Caroline Eriksson, The Missing

Amazon   The Missing begins with a nightmarish scenario. Greta goes out on a lake in a little boat with Alex and four-year-old Smilla. She stays in the boat while they get out to explore a small island. When Greta comes to from an apparent daydream, Alex and Smilla are simply gone. The reader can feel Greta's panic as she tries to find them, except that Greta doesn't respond as most of us do. Rather, her efforts to find them are leaden in the way that one's movements might be in a dream. She forgets what's she doing. She seems dull or slow or drugged. Maddeningly, she doesn't take the logical first step, or at least second step, which is to call the police and have them initiate a search. We soon come to distrust Greta's view of reality: Do Alex and Smilla in fact exist? If so, did Greta kill them and forget doing it? It's impressive that for a long time we really have no idea how much of what's happening is real. Still, the first part of the story is more annoying than not. The book becomes less annoying eventually, when answers to the story's mysteries begin to seep out through the gauze of the storytelling. Ultimately I'd say the book is satisfying, though there is one huge coincidence at the end that I believe remains unaccounted for. I'm not sorry to have read this one, but I come down very much in the middle on it.

Stephenie Meyer, The Chemist

Amazon   I read and enjoyed Stephenie Meyer's Eclipse novels some ten years ago. (Huh. I'd forgotten the firestorm that erupted over the publication of the fourth book in that series! Check out my review: http://www.book-blog.com/2008/12/meyer-stephenie.html.) So I guess I'm not surprised that I liked The Chemist, but I am surprised at how different it was from her other books, not only in subject matter (no shiny vamps, nothing even fantastical), but in writing style. "Alex" is a former interrogator, whose nickname (The Chemist) comes from her preferred interrogation tools. But now she's on the run because her former employers want her dead. Her goal now is simply to stay alive, and she goes to great lengths—described in fascinating (to me) detail by Meyer—to keep her pursuers off her track and to ensure her safety should they find her. That's the status quo, but of course something happens to disrupt her routine. I really enjoyed this book and the trio of main characters, enough so that I kind of wish it were the beginning of a series. I don't think it will be, though.

Comments

[Joy Goswami]

1.

The Missing, This book is a wild, scary ride down a long hall filled with mirrored madness.
Loved this book.

never give up hope quotes