I am really wanting to be wowed by a book. It seems I have not had a real "Wow!" moment with a book in a long time. This book missed the mark, too.

This is a good book, interesting. The main character is remembering a time when she was 10 years old and some girls went missing. She seems a very young and naive 10 years old, still believing in ghosts and monsters and fairy tales. She is friends but not friends with the male lead. It was all written pretty realistically - they behaved like kids and did things the way a kid would do, even when they were sneaking around trying to find clues. They were not smarter than the adults around them, or more clever. But the book just did not grab me.

There were a few places near the beginning where she was writing as an adult looking back, and it was not clear whether the story was going to be about the 10 year old or the adult, and a couple of times where she ended a chapter with hints of what was to come and then repeated the same thing in the next chapter. It made me feel like, just get to it already! I also got tired of the whole grandma-burning-up thing. That, of everything else, was the most unrealistic. Not that it couldn't happen, but surely there could have been something else less silly to make Pia the outcast. But overall, it was a good book.


Product Description

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is an unforgettable debut — at once chilling and endearing, haunting and richly insightful — the story of one girl’s big heart and even bigger imagination, and of a world full of mystery, good, and evil.

It isn’t ten-year-old Pia’s fault that her grandmother dies in a freak accident. But tell that to the citizens of Pia’s little German hometown of Bad Münstereifel, or to the classmates who shun her. The only one who still wants to be her friend is StinkStefan, the most unpopular child in school.

But then something else captures the community’s attention: the vanishing of Katharina Linden. Katharina was last seen on a float in a parade, dressed as Snow White. Then, like a character in a Grimm’s fairy tale, she disappears. But, this being real life, she doesn’t return.

Pia and Stefan suspect that Katharina has been spirited away by the supernatural. Their investigation is inspired by the instructive—and cautionary—local legends told to them by their elderly friend Herr Schiller, tales such as that of Unshockable Hans, visited by witches in the form of cats, or of the knight whose son is doomed to hunt forever.

Then another girl disappears, and Pia is plunged into a new and unnerving place, one far away from fairy tales—and perilously close to adulthood.

Marvelously morbid, stunningly suspenseful, and exceptionally winning, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is a new coming-of-age classic, and the most accomplished fiction debut in years.