Invisible Girl
I found this book un-put-downable, driven both by a fast-moving and suspenseful plot and by the unfolding layers of character development.
The book is divided into “Before” and “After,” the dividing point being Valentine’s night, when one of the characters, 17-year old Saffyre, disappears.
The story takes place in a north-London suburb, told from the points of view of three main characters. Saffyre is a mixed-race high school student to whom something “really, really bad” happened when she was ten (but she’s never told anyone, not even the therapist she was sent to when she started scratching her ankles bloody). Cate is the mother of two teens and is married to a clinical psychologist, Roan. And Owen is a rather sad-sack 34-year old teacher who lives in his aunt’s spare bedroom, across the road from Cate and Roan’s house.
These three lives are on a collision course. When Saffyre disappears, we don’t know if she’s been abducted or killed. And who to suspect: Owen (who’s been suspended from his teaching job for inappropriate touching)? Roan (who Saffyre has been secretly following ever since he terminated her therapy)? Cate and Roan’s son Josh, who seems to have secrets of his own?
The short chapters and the alternating points of view kept me turning pages late into the night as the story unfolded. Each character sees only part of the story, and even they don’t see it clearly. The ultimate climax is both surprising and satisfying—and there’s a final twist at the end.
I’ve written before about Jewell’s roundabout route to becoming a writer and how she first got published. She grew up in north London, and though she’d always loved creative writing at school, she had no expectation of being published. At age 28, she’ was let go from her secretarial job: she was unemployed. A friend who knew she’d always dreamed of being a writer challenged her to write three chapters of a novel in exchange for dinner at her favourite restaurant. She spent a month writing those three chapters, and on a whim decided to send them to ten literary agents. Nine turned her down. The tenth – the same agent who then represented Kate Atkison – said she’d like to see the rest of the manuscript. Jewell hadn’t yet written the rest of the manuscript, but she managed to pull it off. That became her first novel, a romantic comedy called Ralph’s Party. It was the best-selling debut novel in the UK in 1999.
Jewell is a prolific writer; she’s now written nineteen novels and sold over two million books worldwide. Her early novels were at the romantic comedy end of the genre spectrum, but more recently she’s been called the “queen of the just-one-more-page thriller.” She lives in London with her husband, two teenage daughters and three animals.
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