Readers join 14-year-old Abigail Reed as she tells of the experiences of her family that started the summer she was 12. That was when she woke up one morning to find that her younger sister Becky had disappeared. It is the start of a trying journey that will change the way everyone in her family is living.

As you can imagine, the investigation starts with Abby's parents and neighbors being the primary suspects, but with no clues or leads, it is difficult for anyone to really know what happened. Hope slowly starts to fade even as Abby goes back to school, finding herself on the outs because of what has happened. Abby's mother falls into a roller-coaster-of-a-ride of a depression, spending weeks alone in her bedroom only to come out for a bit of normalcy before someone sends her back. Her dad holds on to the hope that Becky will turn up, pinning his hopes on a good friend who is a police detective and by hiring his own private detective. As time passes, the family starts to crumble.

Fortunately for Abby, Tommy, a Floridian teen who has moved in with his grandmother because of his own family issues, ends up becoming a friend. At first, it is a quiet friendship, but it soon develops into a relationship in which they can both have fun and have someone they can talk to about their problems before it evolves into first love.

While the book seems like it is longer than it needs to be, the reader just gets pulled into the challenges that all of the characters are facing. In a way, this feels like someone took The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and rewrote it from the perspective of the victim's sibling. What is it really like to lose a loved one and not know what really happened to her? The book builds to the obvious conclusion, but it is not about the destination, but the journey each of the characters takes.

For Abby, it is about finding a definition for herself rather than the one provided by being connected to each of her family members or her friends.

I did think the ending was a bit rushed. Ironically, I had felt the same way about The Lovely Bones when I read it. I was also a little taken aback by how the kids at school treated Abby. Personally, I think all the kids what do whatever they could to be close to her to get the scoop on what was happening in the bizarre since of the macabre our culture has adopted.

I have no doubt that high school kids, particularly the girls, will find an interesting read with this one, though.