The Nature of Disappearing by Kimi Cunningham Grant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It is no secret that I admire Kimi Cunningham Grant’s ability to draw her readers into her stories and hold us, enthralled, to the very last page. The Nature of Disappearing held me equally captive.
I grew to care about brave, multi-faceted Emlyn Anthony: her sense of abandonment and lack of self-worth, her love of nature and her self-reliance, and her courage to start over – again and again – each time happiness evaded her yearning grasp. This passage says so much about Emlyn:
When I was eleven, my dad got me a dictionary, and then, a few months later, he left…. For a long time, I read it….. And I do this thing. I choose a word for people…. one word that can really summarize a person.
These lines made me sigh deeply. Emlyn was trying to make sense of her world, attempting to label the people in her life. Some of those labels would prove to be woefully false, as she would learn to her cost.
Kimi Cunningham Grant catapulted herself onto my “top ten favourite writers of all time” list with her novel, These Silent Woods. Her descriptions of wild woodlands and mountainous terrain are mesmerizing. You lose all sense of time and place as you fall into the slow cadence of her storytelling.
I didn’t want this story to end – I never do with any of her books! She builds atmosphere and and draws you right into the wilderness with her carefully chosen words. I love losing all sense of myself while I am reading her books, and this book was no exception.
Emlyn’s life changed when she met her BFF – the effervescent, irrepressible Janessa – in college.
Friend. … In fact “friend” was almost too flimsy a word. They’d been more. Confidantes, allies, sisters.
And then they’d been less.
As always with Grant’s novels, there is a mystery to be solved and the characters are plunged into dire straits that seem impossible to overcome. I was on the edge of my seat right up until the end.
I don’t want to give too much of this story away, so I will just say that this was yet another spellbinding read from Kimi Cunningham Grant. Highly, highly recommended! 5 out of 5 well written stars!
My thanks to Kimi Cunningham Grant, her publisher, and NetGalley for an ARC of this equally heartrending and heartwarming novel. Loved every page of it!
Crossing the Pond Reviews 