This has been one of my most anticipated 2020 releases for quite a while! The cover is what first drew me in, but the blurb is what hooked me.
In the winter of 1995 we meet the Thomas family, consisting of Alison, Claire and their parents on a family vacation in the Caribbean. Very quickly you get a feel for the family dynamics and mood of the trip. There’s a significant age gap between the sisters, the family comes from wealth and privilege, etc. Their parents act as most people who can afford luxury resort holidays do: searching for a vague sense of ‘authenticity’, but unwilling and unable to accept accommodation less than they’re accustomed to. When Alison disappears and is discovered several days later, there’s an added layer of outrage. This type of thing just doesn’t happen to people like them. To girls like Alison.
But it feels like that’s all we hear about, doesn’t it? Perhaps I’m not the only one who noticed several beats of this story line up with some we’ve heard before. The first one that comes to mind is Natalee Holloway—missing 18 year-old American girl, one white & two non-white suspects, Caribbean island vacation—but there’s one huge difference so far: a body. The Natalee Holloway case is one of the most dissected investigations I can remember being flashed all over television, and with some of the fewest concrete answers. That’s the one thing I wanted going into this book, more than the Aruban shoulder shrug we got with her.
Though it’s a little more complicated than that, as it turns out. This isn’t the story of a hard-fought battle for justice against some deranged killer. That’s probably where some other reviews were marked down a star; this is a novel, not a thriller. It’s built on the back of a mystery, but that’s not the route that Alexis Schaitkin decides to pursue. There’s an examination of trauma and how we respond to sudden loss. A lot of time is spent with coping and deciding if a person can really ‘start over’. We see how media narratives twist and bend someone else’s misfortune to fit whatever bill they’re trying to sell. People project themselves onto tragic figures and they immortalize them in ways that are different from how they really were.
One of the subjects Schaitkin scrutinizes well is how race, privilege and prejudice can cast people into roles they don’t align with. You just can’t divorce one from the other in cases like this. One victim in one tragedy can ripple out and create new ones. The author doesn’t shy away from the unfairness of it all, she leans into it. In the same breath a victim can be scrutinized and blamed for her own death, but her alleged assailant can be villainized to the point where you are expecting to see him with fangs and horns.
If you’re wondering if there’s some sort of conclusion, if the initial question is resolved, I’d say yes, at least in the ways that matter. There’s a lot left unsaid and seemingly unfinished, but that’s intentional. Not much in life gets a perfectly plotted ending where you have some touching last words, drive off into the sunset or solve the problem to immense personal satisfaction. “With the truth we will do what, become what? And in gaining the truth, what do we lose?”
In the winter of 1995 we meet the Thomas family, consisting of Alison, Claire and their parents on a family vacation in the Caribbean. Very quickly you get a feel for the family dynamics and mood of the trip. There’s a significant age gap between the sisters, the family comes from wealth and privilege, etc. Their parents act as most people who can afford luxury resort holidays do: searching for a vague sense of ‘authenticity’, but unwilling and unable to accept accommodation less than they’re accustomed to. When Alison disappears and is discovered several days later, there’s an added layer of outrage. This type of thing just doesn’t happen to people like them. To girls like Alison.
But it feels like that’s all we hear about, doesn’t it? Perhaps I’m not the only one who noticed several beats of this story line up with some we’ve heard before. The first one that comes to mind is Natalee Holloway—missing 18 year-old American girl, one white & two non-white suspects, Caribbean island vacation—but there’s one huge difference so far: a body. The Natalee Holloway case is one of the most dissected investigations I can remember being flashed all over television, and with some of the fewest concrete answers. That’s the one thing I wanted going into this book, more than the Aruban shoulder shrug we got with her.
Though it’s a little more complicated than that, as it turns out. This isn’t the story of a hard-fought battle for justice against some deranged killer. That’s probably where some other reviews were marked down a star; this is a novel, not a thriller. It’s built on the back of a mystery, but that’s not the route that Alexis Schaitkin decides to pursue. There’s an examination of trauma and how we respond to sudden loss. A lot of time is spent with coping and deciding if a person can really ‘start over’. We see how media narratives twist and bend someone else’s misfortune to fit whatever bill they’re trying to sell. People project themselves onto tragic figures and they immortalize them in ways that are different from how they really were.
One of the subjects Schaitkin scrutinizes well is how race, privilege and prejudice can cast people into roles they don’t align with. You just can’t divorce one from the other in cases like this. One victim in one tragedy can ripple out and create new ones. The author doesn’t shy away from the unfairness of it all, she leans into it. In the same breath a victim can be scrutinized and blamed for her own death, but her alleged assailant can be villainized to the point where you are expecting to see him with fangs and horns.
If you’re wondering if there’s some sort of conclusion, if the initial question is resolved, I’d say yes, at least in the ways that matter. There’s a lot left unsaid and seemingly unfinished, but that’s intentional. Not much in life gets a perfectly plotted ending where you have some touching last words, drive off into the sunset or solve the problem to immense personal satisfaction. “With the truth we will do what, become what? And in gaining the truth, what do we lose?”