Emma Healey’s debut novel, “Elizabeth is Missing”, was published in 2014 and won the Costa Book Award for First Novel. I found it to be an engaging, heartbreaking story of the reality of dementia, as Maud searches for her missing best friend. She has flashes of realization that she has asked these same people the same questions, but there’s nothing she can do about it and she soon lapses back into the panicked searching for Elizabeth, unable to focus on anything else.

Healey’s second novel, “Whistle in the Dark”, is the story of a mother and daughter – Jen and Lana. I read this a couple of weeks ago and had to look up the names of the main characters – a big difference to the level of interest I had to the first novel. This review isn’t going to just be a comparison between the two books, I promise!

The story opens with Lana’s miraculous return after being missing for four days while on an art trip with Jen. She’s okay but has mysterious injuries consistent with sexual assault and has refused a rape kit. She’s withdrawn and has a large gash on the back of her head, with no memory of how or what happened.

They return to London with Jen’s husband and Lana’s father, and gradually the cast of the story increases. The older sister, Meg, comes into view with a lesbian pregnancy as news. Jen’s precarious job in marketing passes by before she’s asked to take a leave of absence to recover after the trauma of losing Lana, and finding her again without knowing what happened.

The narrative perspective is all from Jen and I found it quite difficult to be sympathetic. Lana is clearly depressed and has been suffering from anxiety and depression for a long time even before her disappearance. Jen hounds, harasses and spies on her in an effort to uncover what happened. She examines evidence, decides her daughter went to a literal hell and back and then thinks she’s hiding an intimate relationship before fixating on a religious obsession. It was difficult to not shout ‘just leave her alone and give her cups of tea and a blanket, you selfish, self serving woman’ quite a lot.

She also becomes suspicious of the relationship between Lana and her husband, Hugh. They whisper in rooms and stop talking when she comes in. As the reader and being outside of the story, it’s easy to see that her family are worried about her when she’s clearly struggling.

I did find the story itself interesting – the juxtaposition between the bustle of London and the starkness of the hills and caves provides a definite backdrop to paint the details in. The climactic last chapters provided a good payoff but ultimately for me, I expected more. More than ‘where did Lana go?’, as laid out in the blurb on the back of the book.

Perhaps I couldn’t relate to Jen because I do not have a teenage daughter, and definitely not one who is depressed and has disappeared for four days. I was quite interested in Meg though, and the relationship between her and Lana. The way it was painted by Jen was apparently very differently perceived by the rest of the family, and for me it’s the gap between the perception and the reality which makes for the most interesting stories.

Really liked this book though I struggled in the middle for some reason. A good plot and in depth characters and a few twists and turns too I just thought the middle lacked pace, enjoyable read all the same and I liked the ending!!

‘Whistle in the Dark’ by Emma Healey begins with an ending; a sixteen-year old girl, lost in the Peak District, has been found and is in hospital with her parents. Healey tells the story of the aftermath as Jen, Lana’s mother, tries desperately to unravel the truth of what happened to her daughter. In the face of Lana’s reluctance to speak, Jen’s desperation evolves into obsession and the story circles into myth, obfuscation and misunderstanding. For the reader, there is a lot to unravel.
Told entirely from Jen’s POV, by halfway through I was beginning to question Jen’s state of mind and whether she was an unreliable narrator. There is a lot of smoke and shadows in the telling of this story, interwoven with the crystals of Jen’s friend Grace, the fibs of Lana’s schoolfriend Bethany, the pragmatic questioning and Instagram comments by Jen’s mother Lily, and Jen’s fertile imagination. There were times when it felt a little like being whizzed around in a washing machine. But through it all shines Healey’s ability to draw pictures with words, “The heavy summer foliage that lined the motorway seemed to have taken on its own light, as if the sun had splintered into a thousand pieces and hung, glowing, on the trees. The whites of things, of dresses and china cups and tablecloths, was dazzling.”
I admit there were times in the final third when I just wanted the story to get on with it, to find out where Lana had been for those four missing days. I became as mystified as Jen and could understand her distraction, her inability to judge the truth of what was happening around her as Healey loads on the mysteries. Did Lana return home with an invisible friend? Or a ghost? Jen reads speculation online that something mystical had happened to Lana; she was abducted by aliens, had taken the stairs down to Hell, or stepped into a time circle. This was coupled with my feeling of indulgence on the part of the author, that some short anecdotes were included because they were interesting rather than essential. And then comes a wonderful snippy sentence that brings you back to the heart of everything; for example, when Jen is driving north, “Well, if she cried enough, Jen thought, at least she might not need to wee again for another forty miles.”
An interesting read. A study of the parental difficulties caring for a troubled teenager, where the line stands between caring and invasion of privacy, of how and when to trust a troubled adolescent and when to step in. A veritable minefield. Lana has a history of cutting and an overdose attempt before the disappearance; post-disappearance, Jen alternates between anger and frustration, and treading on eggshells. The online stalking, the shadowing on the walk to school, the listening at the bedroom door, all reinforce the lesson that a snooper often finds something unexpected, something worse, something that should remain private until revealed. A reminder that often the most simple explanation is true.
An interesting read and competent second novel, but not a compelling page-turner like Healey’s wonderful debut Elizabeth is Missing.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/

I found this book a bit overwhelming and couldn't finish it. The story was good but having dealt with teenagers like this it was a bit too close to home.

In her second novel Elizabeth is Missing author Emma Healey casts her forensic eye on a family dynamic put under strain.

Whistle in the Dark looks at a family reunited after a traumatic separation. They’re no longer able to function as they once did, perhaps understandably so, and especially for as long as the mystery of what happened in those missing days goes unresolved.

Getting to the bottom of things is a twisty, often tortuous task but something which Jen takes upon herself. While her husband Hugh favours an altogether more relaxed approach, Jen is dogged and extreme in some of the lengths to which she’ll go. These include stalking Lana on Instagram, overanalysing comments made, and even following her in real life.

I grudgingly admired her for her terrier-like attitude and refusal to give up trying to unearth what happened, while questioning Jen’s behaviour throughout the book, which is often desperate, sometimes verging on paranoid. She becomes obsessed, seemingly self-absorbed, and turns inward, analysing herself and her relationships with others along the way. To the extent where I wondered if it wasn’t Jen who was slowly losing her mind, and she who had more issues than her daughter.

While unpicking its own mystery, Whistle in the Dark explores anxiety and depression. It shows how these manifest themselves in the person suffering, as well as the effect on those closest to them. Jen’s attempts to solve the mystery and fix her daughter send her into a downward spiral of her own. And though Lana has issues even before she disappears, we now see how very isolated she is and how Jen grasps at tiny successes in her attempts to reach her daughter, those small moments of light in all the darkness.

Whistle in the Dark takes you into the fragmented, dark heart of a family, dealing with its demons behind closed doors. Here is the (real and imagined) fear and anxiety that comes with motherhood, the challenge of accepting you no longer have a child but a young adult in your house, of being that young adult with questions and few answers, and a family navigating its mental health issues.

This is a much darker novel than Emma Healey’s debut and one that’s less immediately engaging. Maud’s distinctive voice and her predicament captivated me far sooner in Elizabeth is Missing than Jen and Lana’s do here. It’s worth staying the course with this family though for when the payoff does come, it’s a revelatory experience. As the puzzle pieces slot into place in Whistle in the Dark, Emma Healey illuminates some dark corners of the mind with this sensitive portrayal of a family in crisis.

Oh, but this was a struggle to finish. I was so looking forward to it, a mother and daughter go on a painting holiday and the daughter vanishes. An exciting premise and the book starts well. However, it rambles and rambles and I found the prose difficult to follow and frankly irritating.

It does get there in the end and for me it wrapped things up quite well, it just felt too much like hard work to get there.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the opportunity to preview this book.

The synopsis of the book drew me in and as a fan of mystery thrillers, I couldn’t wait to read this book but I just couldn’t get into this book, I tried to read a couple of chapters and it was confusing and I couldn’t get into the characters

This was painful. What had a great premis turned out to be a long and boring ramble. Not read a book for ages that was so dire.

Really enjoyed the previous book 'Elizabeth is missing' but this book was definitely missing something and I didn't enjoy so much. I didn't like any of the characters, found the daughter really really annoying, and the reason for the whole shenanigans, which was only revealed at the end, was daft.

I loved "Elizabeth is Missing" so was eagerly anticipating Healey's follow up. I wasn't disappointed.

In a world of ever more complicated plot twists, Healy presents us with a mystery novel where the mystery is set up on the first page, and satisfactorily solved at the end. The finely drawn mother/daughter pairing and sharp observation of modern familial relationships rang true for me.

I adored this book and cannot wait to read what Healy writes next.

Emma Healey is without doubt one of the best new voices in fiction. Elizabeth is Missing is one of my favourite books of all time and in this novel, Healey reminded me exactly why I fell in love with her writing in the first place. The prose is elegant and the story beautifully told.

A fantastic read. Thoroughly enjoyed this and it is not something I would usually pick up. Will look for more from this author in future.

What happened in those missing hours and days? That question runs throughout the story, does Lana even know herself? The story kept me entertained and eager to find out just what did happen on their trip.

I found this book rather disappointing and found myself skipping through whole unneeded paragraphs, shame because the basis of the story was good and could have been done fantastically.

A dark, moving portrayal of memory, family relationships, grief and trauma. Whilst I enjoyed Whistle in the Dark, and will review the book on its own merit, I can't help but feel that Emma's second book is a shadow of her first, and that the plot execution, character development just isn't as strong in Whistle in the Dark. It must've been a difficult novel to write, grappling with the complexities of life and how we navigate our way through the dark periods in our time. I would recommend to other people, but for me, what is most brilliant about this writer is her ability to fuse light and dark, exploring dark and difficult issues with a glimmer of hope and humour and unfortunately Whistle in the Dark didn't deliver on this.

An interesting enough premise. Fifteen-year-old Lana goes missing for four agonising days. She’s found, apparently unharmed, but refuses to talk about what happened to her. The police close the case but her mother Jen is determined to find out the truth. Her obsessive tracking down of clues – complicated by many red herrings – take up most of the book and unfortunately it all becomes tedious after a while. Lana is obviously a very troubled teenager but never a very sympathetic one, and her mother’s reaction, although understandable, again fails to elicit empathy, as she’s such an irritating and self-obsessed character. The novel rambles on to an unsatisfying conclusion, and although there is some good writing here, there’s a lot of repetition and extraneous detail and some strange non-sequiturs, and I ultimately rather lost interest. A disappointing follow-up to Elizabeth is Missing.

It is perhaps not surprising that a mother is agitated and traumatised when her 15 year old daughter is found after a four day absence, wandering, following an extensive search. The daughter professes not to know where she has been or whether anyone else was involved in her disappearance. We follow the subsequent relationship between Mother and Daughter with the former pressing for explanations and the latter, much like any teenager, resentful of this maternal pressure. Eventually there is a resolution of the mystery.
Many will enjoy reading this book but I am afraid it just was not for me.

Jen's youngest daughter Lana has been a concern, from her self-harming to her secrecy Jen isn't sure what else is going to happen. Then towards the end of a mother-daughter holiday Lana goes missing. When she is found five days later and covered in blood Jen fears the worst, particularly when Lana response to questioning is that she can't remember. This forces Jen to reassess herself as a parent and then to try to retrace Lana's footsteps to find the truth about the lost time.

I know that Healey is a well-respected author and whilst I did not read her first novel I jumped at the opportunity to read this. In many ways there is a lot to like about this book but I found Jen such a narcissistic character that I felt frustrated. The ending, whilst predictable, brought the story full circle but it didn't leave me wanting more.

I found this to be an intriguing read full of mystery, although it did fall a little flat for me on emotional impact throughout.

It's the story of how a family deal with a daughter who has gone missing for 4 days and then when she is found she refuses to tell them where she was, what happened... leaving them to let their imaginations run wild as to the horrors their daughter may have faced. It really explores the mother / daughter relationship well - no matter how much the mother tries to ease information out of Lana, her every attempt is seemingly thrown back in her face. And this leads to the mother going to extreme measures to try and find out any bits of information she can as to the events of those 4 days.

It was interesting to see how the rest of the family all dealt with this emotional trauma, and quite difficult to comprehend at times why the daughter was so reluctant to share any information and help the rest of her family come to terms with what happened.

I found it to be quite a slow paced read - the storyline just ambled along which did help to get a taste of how time can freeze at times of shocking events and allowed every thought that went through their minds helped build up more of the picture of the aftermath. But this did often feel like it was going nowhere and did feel a little suffocating - just like the events the family faced.

Overall it was an interesting read, if a little underwhelming at times.

This was an unexpectedly compelling thrill ride of a book.

The subject of our story is Lana who has been found after being missing for 4 days. Already a 15 year old daughter living through various challenges, she seems to have subtle yet obvious changes about her when she is found, despite her claim to have just gotten lost. The story is told through the voice of our main protagonist Jen, Lana's Mum, who is going on a journey akin to hell - her daughter is subdued, physically injured, and not telling her a single thing about those 4 days. As a Mum I could completely relate to her frustration and anguish. I could also relate to the fact that no crisis occurs in a bubble, there are always other things to deal with too. C'est la vie.

So our wonderful writer presents all things in bite sized chunks under witty and analogous headings which breaks it down easily for the reader. I particularly enjoyed this type of short chapter bursts which added to the sense of Jen's frustration and Lana's inability to deal with lengthy conversations or family situations.

So what did happen to Lana in those 4 days? The author takes us on a twisted, knotty journey that unravels the story of Jen, her relationships with her own mother, her friend, her eldest daughter, her husband, herself. What is Jen really searching for?

I found this to a unique perspective on a missing person; what happens when they come home. Utterly atmospheric, immersive and compelling, any reader will be hooked. Absolutely thought provoking, the writing style evoking the changes of emotions, and ultimately creating a very real story of a found 15 year old girl and what it does to the family, friends and the world of social media.

Themes: missing persons, found persons, religious cults, manipulation, coercion, family dynamics, self-harm, sibling rivalry, mother daughter relationships, social media