I read MISSING CLARISSA immediately after reading TELL ME WHAT REALLY HAPPENED (due to Instagram-Synchronicity), and now I think this is the way the two books ought to be read, not a duology but sort of two different perspectives on similar situations and individuals. The eponymous long-vanished Clarissa is an earlier-era version in many ways of the elusive Maylee in TELL ME WHAT REALLY HAPPENED (a good two decades earlier, nearly an entire generation, with the immense changes the 21st century's first two decades have wrung). Then too, there's strong and sensitive LGBT rep here, and also there's inclusion of perspectives of marginalized societies and individuals. Without spoilering, there's also a thread which has very much in common, I believe, with the novel MY DARK VANESSA.
MISSING CLARISSA is a YA Horror/Thriller/Psychological Thriller that amazingly becomes deeper and more engrossing as the novel progresses, to the point where I became fearful not only for Clarissa, back in 1999, but for the intrepid contemporary co-protagonists, two sixteen-year-old high school junior girls, in a small insular Pacific Northwest community, uncovering ugly secrets and entrenched corruption. Remember, if the secrets are deep enough, somebody's going to be willing to kill to protect those secrets...and themselves.
Release March 7 2023
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