Book Review: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell

 

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Content Warning: misogyny, rape, child death, forced institutionalization, emotional/verbal abuse, medical trauma, discrimination and stigmatization of mental illness. 

Iris Lockhart knows that her grandmother, Kitty, is an only child. So when she receives a call from Cauldstone - a mental hospital - claiming that her great-aunt Esme has resided there for over sixty years, it sends her world into a freefall. What is she supposed to do with this stranger? She's already got enough on her plate, between her vintage clothing shop and her painfully complicated relationship with the man she's been seeing. What she doesn't realize is that Esme has been harboring dark secrets for all these years, and they're about to rise to the surface, throwing everything she thought she knew into question.

This is an extremely dark book, burdened by heavy themes. It's slim at just under three-hundred pages, but the punch it packs is powerful. It raises questions of what constitutes as family, how we hurt the people we love, and how the misunderstood are treated as less than human simply because of their differences. The characters are strong, with both Esme and Iris leaping off the page, so real as to seem almost touchable. The writing flows easily, with descriptions that transport you back to India during England's colonial reign or to the modern-day beachside. Not to mention that the structure of the novel itself, with its shadowy memories and slow revelations, leaves you wanting to read just one more page.

I think my only criticism is that I wish there had been more closure at the end, but I also think it was clever for O'Farrell to force you to draw your own conclusions. The main "twist" I saw coming probably a little less than halfway through, but I don't think that is a detriment whatsoever. Instead, it implies a slow-creeping up of the past, of the inevitability of secrets uncovered. All of the dynamics between the characters were both full of drama and realistic in their complexity. To be honest, I could've read a much longer book about all of them! 

I won't say much more, so as not to spoil anything, because I cannot recommend that you pick it up for yourself enough. It's dark, haunting, gorgeously done, and left me thinking of the story even after I'd finished it and moved on. Please, do yourself a favor and read this one! I'm very interested in reading another book by O'Farrell. She's a great example of what an author can do with emotion and a character-driven plot.