“My name was Eileen Dunlop…I was twenty-four years old and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teen age boys…In a week I would run away from home and never go back…This is the story of how I disappeared.”

It is 1964, just a few weeks before Christmas in a small New England coastal town. Eileen’s mother died when she was nineteen and her father, a police officer, lost his job after quickly sliding into an alcoholic stupor after her mother’s death. Eileen’s sister got married and left home, leaving Eileen to take care for their increasingly belligerent father on her own.

Something is twisted inside Eileen. She is filled with self loathing and has a penchant for the morbid, like Egyptian burial customs where they remove the brain through the nose or imagining in vivid detail the icicles on her front porch falling and stabbing her to death. Her life, if you could call it that, was spent at her job or buying alcohol for her father. The house, untouched since her mother died is filled with dirty dishes and dirty clothes, that somehow she has no capacity to do anything about. She is just existing, until one day Rebecca Saint John, the new counselor for the juvenile correctional facility, arrives and things change.

Rebecca is everything that Eileen is not; pretty, self-confident, smart, and friendly. For the first time Eileen believes that she might be able to make a friend. Enthralled by everything Rebecca does, Eileen begins to emerge from her self imposed isolation. But her affection for Rebecca makes her blind, and soon she is pulled into a crime far beyond what she could have ever imagined.

This book, which was short listed for the 2016 Booker Prize, does not disappoint! Mesmerizing and shocking, but always grounded by the clear sighted and honest narrator, we are drawn to this strange young woman who struggles to find a way to claim her own life.

Brenda’s Rating: *****(5 out of 5 Stars)

Recommend this book to: Sharon, Marian, Lauren and Keith

Book Study Worthy? YES!

Read in ebook format.