The summers when I was 11 and 12 years old stand out more clearly in memory than other points in my childhood; I was too young to have even a babysitting job, but old enough to roam the neighborhood with my friends largely unsupervised. It was a stage where I was starting to be aware of the adult world, but was still pretty naïve.

The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone taps into that period of adolescence perfectly. The book is mostly narrated by an eleven-year-old girl, Tikka, as she experiences the tumultuous summer in 1992 when her friends, the Van Apfel girls, go missing. Due to her age, Tikka is an unreliable narrator; she’s oblivious to some of the things going on around her that an adult would notice. As much as this is a thriller, it’s also a coming-of-age story, as Tikka loses a part of her childhood the night the Van Apfel girls disappear. I love a cold case story, and the twist of a child narrator for a large portion of the book made this novel stand out from the thriller crowd.

I do want to warn readers that this book contains scenes of domestic violence, violence to animals (mice, if it matters), and implied sexual abuse. The book also doesn’t have a clear-cut ending, so if you need absolute closure, it’s going to irritate you. I personally felt satisfied by the conclusion even though some questions went unanswered.

This novel unravels slowly and deliciously, and the writing is beautiful and immersive. Take the opening sentence:

The ghost turned up in time for breakfast, summoned by the death rattle of cornflakes in their box.

The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone opens with an adult Tikka flying from the United States back to the Australian suburb where she grew up. Tikka’s older sister, Laura, has cancer, necessitating the visit. It’s during this time at home that she reflects on the unsolved disappearance of three girls that has haunted her into adulthood. Sometimes she and Laura discuss what happened, trying to order events correctly, and disagreeing about their childhood memories. Then we slip away from current-Tikka to eleven-year-old-Tikka who narrates the events of that summer.

Going into the book we know that the three Van Apfel girls, Hannah, Cordelia and Ruth, went missing during the summer of 1992. Ruth’s body was eventually found, but Hannah and Cordelia never were. There was never an arrest made, and the event exists in community gossip to the present day.

Tikka and her sister played with the Van Apfel girls as they were all neighbors and of a similar age. The Van Apfels are extremely religious, and Tikka is instinctively afraid of their father who behaves in ways that she classifies as odd, but an adult reader sees as abusive and controlling. The middle daughter, Cordelia, age 13, is the most enigmatic to Tikka. She wants to be Cordelia’s friend, but Cordelia is mysterious and flighty. She sleepwalks out of her house, which enrages her father. She jumps out of a tree and breaks her arm that summer. To young Tikka these are quirks, but to the reader it paints a picture of something else. Something is happening in the Van Apfel house, and Cordelia is the center of it.

This is from one of the childhood narrative sections:

The way Ruth reported it, it wasn’t until later that night that the Lord visited Mr. Van Apfel, who in turn came to Cordie when she was taking a bath. There he held her head under the shampoo-slick surface to cast away all of her sins. Swimming costume sins. Sleepwalking sins. (Cold-car-engines-in-red-hatch-backs sins). He was careful to keep her cast arm dry, and it protruded like a plaster periscope. While the rest of her shameful body was submerged and washed clean. Baptism among the bath salts and bubbles.

And when Mrs. Van Apfel walked past putting clean laundry away, she must have wondered what her husband was doing in the bathroom while their thirteen-year-old daughter was in the bath. But when she heard him talking in tongues, she knew it was the Lord’s work. That he was building a temple to Jesus right there and then in the en suite.

Eleven-year-old Tikka thinks this behavior is strange, while adult Tikka recognizes it as abuse. This books is operating through two different lenses, one innocent, one cynical, and it balances that duality well.

Young Tikka is also preoccupied by childhood things–not being left out when the older girls want to gossip, writing a play for a school production, obsessively following the Azaria Chamberlain case on the news with the grim fascination of a kid.

Even as adult Tikka searches for closure and answers about what happened to Cordelia and Hannah, she notices the way their disappearance has scarred her community. Her parents are reluctant to talk about it, and when they do, they question if they should have noticed something was amiss. Her sister, Laura, is cagey and defensive about what details they did have as children.

I can’t go into any more without spoiling the book, but I felt that, by the end, I had enough of an understanding of the context of that summer to make a safe assumption about what happened to Cordelia and Hannah, and to understand why Ruth died. It’s strange for me to feel comfortable with an ambiguous ending to a mystery, but in this case I felt I was given so much detail that I was able to reach a conclusion of my own with a decent amount of certainty.

I also loved Tikka’s dual narration. I’ve never experienced an event like three of my friends vanishing, but sometimes when I reminisce about our adolescence with my sister, I realize how different events were different from how I initially perceived them. It’s an unsettling feeling sometimes to re-evaluate old memories as an adult, and this book taps into that sense of unease perfectly. If had to classify it, I’d say this book contains a healthy dose of Gothic nostalgia. It’s like looking back at childhood photographs that seem happy and noticing the shadows in the background.

The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is one of the more unique thrillers I’ve read in a long time and it sucked me in completely. Some readers will want more answers that we’re given, but I found the ending enough to leave me satisfied.