Book Review - Fragile by Lisa Unger

Everybody knows everybody in The Hollows, a quaint, charming town outside of New York City. It’s a place where neighbors keep an eye on one another’s kids, where people say hello in the grocery store, and where high school cliques and antics are never quite forgotten. As a child, Maggie found living under the microscope of small-town life stifling. But as a wife and mother, she has happily returned to The Hollows’s insular embrace. As a psychologist, her knowledge of family histories provides powerful insights into her patients’ lives. So when the girlfriend of her teenage son, Rick, disappears, Maggie’s intuitive gift proves useful to the case—and also dangerous.

Eerie parallels soon emerge between Charlene’s disappearance and the abduction of another local girl that shook the community years ago when Maggie was a teenager. The investigation has her husband, Jones, the lead detective on the case, acting strangely. Rick, already a brooding teenager, becomes even more withdrawn. In a town where the past is always present, nobody is above suspicion, not even a son in the eyes of his father.

“I know how a moment can spiral out of control,” Jones says to a shocked Maggie as he searches Rick’s room for incriminating evidence. “How the consequences of one careless action can cost you everything.”

As she tries to reassure him that Rick embodies his father in all of the important ways, Maggie realizes this might be exactly what Jones fears most. Determined to uncover the truth, Maggie pursues her own leads into Charlene’s disappearance and exposes a long-buried town secret—one that could destroy everything she holds dear. This thrilling novel about one community’s intricate yet fragile bonds will leave readers asking, How well do I know the people I love? and How far would I go to protect them?

My Thoughts:

I love Lisa Unger's novels! Fragile was everything I thought it could be, plus more.

I love Maggie's character...she is so down-to-earth and as a psychologist, cares as much for her patients as she does her own family. Her son Ricky is dating the missing girl and becomes a suspect in her disappearance. Jones, Maggie's husband, is a cop who believes that his own son has something to do with his girlfriend's disappearance.

I liked the way the story was told by multiple points of view, and was tied in to another young girl's disappearance 20+ years earlier, in the same town. She had been a classmate of Maggie & Jones's. In alternating chapters, Lisa tells the tale of Sally's disappearance some 20 years earlier and the eerie similarities between the 2 missing girls, past and present.

Although the main focus of Fragile is the story of a missing girl, Lisa bravely expounds on the subjects of marital discord, family secrets and the familiarity of growing up and living in the same small, tight-knit community forever.

I want to thank Crystal at BookSparks for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.

Very Good!

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Crown (August 3, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307393992
• ISBN-13: 978-0307393999