In the vein of The Lovely Bones and The Little Friend, Ghosts of the Missing follows the mysterious disappearance of a twelve-year-old girl during a town parade and the reverberations of this tragedy throughout the town. On Saturday, October 28, 1995, a girl vanished. She was not a child particularly prized in town…When questioned by reporters, those who’d known Rowan described her as … those who’d known Rowan described her as ‘quiet’ and ‘loner’ and ‘shy’ and even ‘awkward.’ Words for pity.
Culleton, New York has a long history–of writers, of artists, and of unsolved mysteries. It’s where Adair grew up before she moved to Brooklyn to try to make it as an artist. But after years away from her hometown and little to show for it, Adair decides to return. She moves back in to Moye House, the old mansion, and current writer’s retreat, imbued with her family’s legacy.
Ciaran is a writer staying at Moye House in the hopes of finally solving the mystery of what happened to Rowan Kinnane–his sister, and Adair’s childhood best friend. As the two begin investigating, secrets long buried rise to the surface, complicating their sense of themselves and their understanding of what happened on that fateful day.
With her “knack for capturing heartbreaking moments with a gripping simplicity” (Village Voice), Kathleen Donohoe lures us into a haunting world of secrets and obsessions and shows just how far people will go in search of the truth.
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Rowan Kinnane was just a shy, awkward, peculiar child. She was nothing extraordinary until she disappeared from her Culleton, New York home on October 28, 1995. The theories and accusations started flying.
It is also in Culleton where Adair grew up. Culleton, known for its writers and its mysterious history, is where Adair grew up sketching everything. She was a distant cousin of Rowan and her best friend…probably her only true friend. Adair’s family owns the mysterious Moye House that is currently open as a retreat house for writers. When Adair’s parents die, she returns to Culleton, after having moved to Brooklyn to become a famous artist. When Ciaran, a writer investigating the disappearance of Rowan 15 years before shows up for a writing retreat at Moye House, the secrets start to reveal themselves.
This book is sometimes a bit foggy, but, if you have patience, it is worth it. The author tries to be mysterious, and often succeeds. However, sometimes, she loses the reader. It is a great idea to stick by this book, though. It has a lot to offer. It has great characters and a great mystery. It has haunting settings and a mystical quality. Enjoy!
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.
This is the first book I’ve read by Kathleen Donohoe so I had no idea what to expect. What I received was so much more! Not only was I mesmerized by the story of Rowan but there are others that went missing in this small town where seemingly everyone knows everyone else’s business. (If you’ve never experienced that, let me assure you, growing up in a hamlet of 450 people, it’s not unusual for someone to know what you had for your last meal if you were to pass gas) This is a mystery with small-town gossip, Irish folklore, romance, and the dysfunction of family. Kathleen Donohoe has taken all this and given her characters the inquisitiveness to ask all the questions that were going through my mind and taking me on a journey the likes of which I hadn’t experienced in some time. This was an exceptional read.
This book finely layers Irish Lore with early American Hudson River life creating a delicious treat for readers.
The title would lead one to believe that this is a mystery-haunting, and I’ve seen some comparisons to Lovely Bones. I feel that is a shabby treatment. This book is about storytellers and storytelling—family, love, and females—women as a conduit for history, prophecy, warning, and knowledge because they are loved more by nature than their male counterparts. Ghosts of the Missing is a much pulling from a far richer vein of inspiration than Lovely Bones.
One thing that goes hand in hand with knowledge is mysteriousness. Questions and wisdom can obfuscate and clarify something at the same time. Kathleen Donohoe handly does this with her readers by juggling stories and timelines. But there is one common theme; there is a strange beauty in our living memories, and an upsetting sense incompletion when we don’t know how another person’s story ends.
‘”She is a thief or she is what was stolen,” Helen said. “Believe what you will, but either way, she’s the girl who was lost.”
“But why is she here if this happened in Ireland?”
“I’m all that’s left of the family. She goes with me.”‘
One of my favorite quotes of the book, and pretty much the brick and mortar Kathleen Donohoe builds her story upon, we can believe what we want of a story told. We take away from what we hear or read what we want, and it goes with us afterward because frequently, that is all we have left.
Adair McCrohan has spent most of her life divulging her secrets regardless of her wishes. She’s never had the luxury of being a mystery. But she came very close as a child of touching a mystery when her childhood friend Rowen vanished. In every other way, she’s been a painfully open book of violated privacy even when it was no longer publically necessary for her life to be public notice.
Rowan Kinnane was larger than life in Adair’s life for a short time before Rowan disappeared. Years later, Ciaran Riordan shows up to shake up the dust and raise the dead because he wants to know what happened the day Rowan went missing.
But Kathleen Donohoe illustrates to her readers, no story is linear, no one’s life is as simple as one would see initially on paper, and asking questions leads to even more questions rather than it does answers.
Donohoe is a storyteller, and she shuttles along several threads from the Old World to present, living to the dead, she braids the stories together and then pulls them apart.
I’m a word nerd; Ghosts of the Missings is a treasure trove of subtleties and lovely passages. One of the things I loved was that she very hidden wilderness of fertility and womanhood: Rowan, Willow, Hazel, Adair (Oak), and Evelyn, our matron of a garden.
Or the care is taken in the name of the residents at Moye House tending to have names of creatives: Cecilia, Michan, Janus, Jorie, and Lissa. These things are indulgencies.
The real beauty is in the crafting of Adair as our heroine and her journey. It has everything to do with hanging your bell in an oak tree rather than an ash tree and making a wish that the story you believe and the true story are the same.
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary advance copy of this book.
Smart, gorgeously written, and fabulously unsettling, Donohoe’s novel is about a twelve-year-old girl who vanishes during a parade, and how years later, her tormented best friend struggles to find out what really happened to her and why. About the enduring bonds of friendship, the garrote of secrets, and the most important story of all: how we live and how we die. Donohoe casts a remarkable spell. Loved, loved, loved this novel.
Kathleen Donohoe is a writer of insight, understanding and authenticity. In Ghosts of the Missing, she has created a poignant, rich, beautifully told narrative that echoes with chords of memory that neither time nor distance can undo.The novel places her in the company of elegant, eloquent storytellers like Kathleen Hill and Alice McDermott.
Kathleen Donohoe weaves the past and present, terrors imagined and all too real into a fascinating story of myth and mystery… I loved the two girls at the center of this tale and so will you.
In this beautiful and compelling novel, past and present move in lock step as their ghosts flow between the years. A thrilling and surprising page-turner in which the mystery of a place and its people unfolds. Reminiscent of one of my favorite books, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Kathleen Donohoe shows us that what we love and what haunts us are often one in the same.