The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

April 15, 2019
A journalist makes her fiction debut with a tale of missing girls as told by one girl who never stopped missing them. So many girls disappear. This is true in life. It's maybe even truer in fiction. Girls who go missing are an endless source of fascination. Or maybe this is just when the girls are white and, at the very least, middle-class. These girls are especially compelling when they're beautiful. Cordelia Van Apfel was white, middle-class, and beautiful before she and her sisters vanished from an Australian suburb in 1992, and she is the absence at the heart of McLean's debut novel. Tikka Malloy is heading home from America because her sister, Laura, is battling cancer. Tikka's return doesn't revive her search for the beguiling Cordie--she has never stopped searching for Cordie; she sees Cordie everywhere--but Tikka's presence brings long-buried secrets back to the surface of the insular community in which she and her sister became friends with the Van Apfel girls before they disappeared. Tikka has a sharp sense of self-awareness. She recognizes that her place in the hierarchy of neighborhood girls--not quite included by the older girls, eager to separate herself from the younger--and the trauma of losing her friends have left her stunted as an adult. But all of this makes Tikka a terrific narrator. She examines her memories with the perspective of a grown-up, and she finds that people who were reticent to tell her everything when the Van Apfel girls went missing are eager to unburden themselves now. Tikka's conversations with her father are especially affecting, and of course the local busybody and Tupperware saleswoman has a great deal of information and insight to share. There are, ultimately, no real surprises. What happened to Cordie is something that happens to any number of girls. It's the disappearance of her sisters with her that made her story sensational. But Cordie isn't like other girls for Tikka, which makes her special for the reader, too. A wry, sad coming-of-age story and a well-crafted first novel.

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April 29, 2019
In McLean’s eerie debut, narrator Tikka Malloy can’t forget the summer of 1992: that was the summer her three best friends, the Van Apfel sisters—Hannah, Ruth, and the hauntingly beautiful Cordelia—walked off into the wild bushland near their Australian suburb, never to be seen again. In a winding novel of flashbacks and hidden memories, readers see Tikka, now a woman in her 30s who has since moved to Baltimore, unable to move past that one summer. Returning to Australia to care for her sister, Laura, who was recently diagnosed with cancer, Tikka navigates the shadowy past of her childhood. Through conversations with Laura, neighbors, and her parents, Tikka stumbles upon painful feelings of guilt, hidden secrets and scandals, and memories better left forgotten. McLean peels back the layers of one scorching Australian summer, revealing the dark secrets and lies hidden behind the cheerful facade of suburbia. This debut, part coming-of-age story and part crime thriller, is both forceful and unnerving.

Starred review from June 1, 2019

In 1992, the news throughout Australia was about the infamous Lindy Chamberlain trial. Tikka Malloy was 11 when that story was the soundtrack of the hot summer. It was also the summer when the three Van Apfel sisters disappeared. The girls were best friends with Tikka and older sister Laura. Now 20 years later, Tikka returns to the Sydney suburbs, where she still thinks she sees Cordelia Van Apfel on the streets. What really happened in 1992? Tikka and Laura analyze that summer to determine if the three sisters ran away from their parents, who were religious zealots. Were the sisters taken? Did something worse occur? Everyone in the small neighborhood, including Tikka's parents, kept secrets they should have revealed to the police. This debut coming-of-age mystery is a haunting story of bewilderment and lost innocence that leaves questions unanswered while plaguing Tikka with guilt and uncertainty for decades. VERDICT The news stories and descriptions evoke 1990s Australia in this engrossing, atmospheric debut. Fans of William Kent Krueger's Ordinary Grace may want to try. [See "Winter/Spring Debuts," LJ 3/19.]--Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

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May 1, 2019
When thirtysomething Tikka Malloy returns to her native Australia from her home in Baltimore to visit her older sister, Laura, memories come flooding back of the three Van Apfel sisters?Hannah, 14; Cordelia, 13; and Ruth, 7. Neighbors and best friends of Tikka and Laura, the three girls vanished 20 years earlier, when Tikka was 11 and Laura, 14. Two of the sisters, Hannah and Cordelia, have never been seen since. Tragically, Ruth was soon found dead, but her sisters' fate remains unclear. Tikka and Laura know Hannah and Cordelia have runaway and, indeed, have attempted to help them. But they remain silent, an act that will haunt them over the decades to come. With Tikka's arrival in Australia, the story begins to move backward and forward in time. Readers learn that the girls' parents are religious zealots, that their father is violent and physically abusive, and that beautiful, charismatic Cordelia has a shocking secret. The story is a compelling one, with a nice layer of suspense that keeps the pages turning until its hauntingly melancholy end.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2019
Felicity McLean’s debut novel The Van Apfel Girls are Gone opens with the arrival of a ghost, ‘summoned by the death rattle of Cornflakes in their box’. It is an apt beginning, for this is a novel haunted by trauma, death and the disappearance of three young girls. It is 1992 and, somewhere in suburban Australia, eleven-year-old Tikka Molloy and her older sister Laura divide their time between school and the Van Apfel family’s swimming pool. Tikka is in thrall to the eldest Van Apfel girls, Hannah and Cordelia. For readers who were captivated by the Lisbons in Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides or Miranda in Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock, these girls are similarly mythologised as ethereal queens of their small domain. But behind closed doors, they are ruled by their violent, fanatical father. When the Van Apfel sisters disappear in local bushland, Tikka suffers a trauma from which she, and the entire neighbourhood, never fully recover. Returning home 20 years later, Tikka and her sister are forced to confront the past. McLean expertly maintains an air of suspense as the tragedy unfolds. Tikka is an unforgettable, if not entirely reliable, narrator full of black humour, brutal honesty and naive curiosity. This novel is one that will haunt readers long after they have turned the last page. Angela Elizabeth is a bookseller and freelance writer