“‘I’ve been here,’ Scarlett said to no one.
The others came in, too.
She stopped at a red horse on a springy coil, the kind you sit on . . . and rock.
Sarah was all panic. ‘Why don’t we remember where we live?‘”
As the mom of a current kindergartner, the idea of this book seemed scary enough to avoid. Well, then I had three students in a row read the 421 page tome in under a week and ask me about it so I thought I better have real answers instead of the vague ones I am sometimes guilty of when I haven’t read a book, or when I have forgotten what it is about. Needless to say, just as E. Lockhart states on the cover, once I started reading I was SUCKED in. I couldn’t even imagine how I would react if my daughter never came home after the first day of kindergarten. That is exactly what happens to these six families here. Told through alternating chapters between two “survivors” and one sibling of a survivor, this psychological thriller had me making predictions left and right about what could have happened to these kids and how they could not have any memory of where they have been for the last 11 years and only a few pieces of memories left from before.
It is interesting to think about what would happen to the families. Would they relocate? Would the marriages fall apart? Would they fall into depression or go crazy looking for their lost child? Each of these ideas and more are explored as the characters try to discover who they are and how they came to be returned. They all go through a series of intelligence and physical tests, hypnosis, and MRIs to try and learn something about where they have been. Ultimately who can they trust when they can hardly trust themselves? And then someone recognizes one of them, a swallowed penny, a strange tattoo. Tiny fragments of details that challenge everything they know come into play.
Here is an example of a Storyboard That created from this book. 