Fourteen-year-old Janie and her older sister Diana live with their father and Aunt Renée in an unnamed seaside town. When two younger girls go missing, Janie finds herself drawn into the unfolding story of their disappearance. She fantasises about finding the pair but also imagines the worst. Janie’s emotional investment in the story of the disappearances has a depth and urgency related not only to her affinity with the missing girls, but also to the fact that her own mother is absent. The clue is in the title: Janie and Diana are as lost as the missing girls.
Taylor writes beautiful, intense prose, richly evocative and with a strong appeal to the senses that’s as vivid as it is tactile. She exhibits many of the qualities we look for in a first-time novelist, among them a certain sharpness of eye and a desire to remake the world according to a unique sensibility.
So, she’s bold enough to have a go at synaesthesia – ‘tobacco-yellow breath’, ‘a practical bluish scent’ – and skilful enough to make it work.
With the sea a constant, brooding presence, water seeps into Janie’s imagination in times of doubt or fear:
‘I can’t stop thinking about photographs and secrets. About the darkness rolling like water beneath my sister’s bed.’
Never far from Janie’s thoughts is the new life growing inside Diana, suspended in its own dark fluid. Sweating in the grip of ever-darkening fantasies, Janie becomes delirious: ‘I close my eyes and right away I’m slowly sinking, the room a warm dark bath.’ Recommended.
