Wow this book. Very poignant and rattling. It explores family, connections and perception. Everyone in this book is hurting and struggling in different isolating ways and is not sharing that with those around them. In a way it reminds me of [b:The Heart is a Lonely Hunter|37380|The Heart is a Lonely Hunter|Carson McCullers|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1385265834s/37380.jpg|860196]. Lonely in different personal ways, misunderstanding each other and the world around them. The book is less about Lydia's disappearance and more about the inner lives of her loved ones. It's a novel that stays with you for a long time. I would love to discuss the ending with others.

The biggest thing I took from this novel was how much parental issues can affect children and the value of communicating feelings and insecurities. This fictional story taught me that lesson in a stronger way than I believe reading a scientific article or non-fiction book would have.

There was some language and sex but none gratuitous.

"How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia's mother and father, because of her mother's and father's mothers and fathers."

"She and Nath both knew: that she felt it, too, this pull she now exerted, and didn't want it. That the weight of everything tilting toward her was too much."

"Though her father had never mentioned his schooldays, though she had never heard the story of her parents' marriage or their move to Middlewood, Lydia felt the ache of it all, deep and piercing as a foghorn."

"Lydia thought of her parents' cars: all the indicators and warning lights to tell you if the oil was too low, if the engine was too hot , if you were driving with the parking brake on or the door or the trunk or the hood open. They didn't trust you. They needed to check you constantly, to remind you what to do and what not to do."

"Sometime you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else. In homeroom or at at the drugstore at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or pricked out a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn't think about it all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their states: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again."

"'I dunno,' she said. 'People decide what you're like before they even get to know.' She eyed him, suddenly fierce. 'Kind of like you did with me. They think they know all about you. Except you're never who they think you are.'"

"The dean had canceled his summer class the week after Lydia's death. 'Take some time for yourself, James' he had said, touching James gently on the shoulder. He did this with everyone he needed to soothe: students enraged over low grades, faculty slighted by the grants they did not receive. His job was to make losses feel smaller."

"You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing."

"Everything that loomed so large close up--school, their parents, their lives--all you had to do was step away, and they shrank to nothing."

"It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales."

"Before that she hadn't realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it."