Capture Songs For The Missing Presented By Stewart ONan Available In EPub

few weeks before leaving for college, Kim Larsen disappeared on her way to work in a small town in Ohio, This book deals with the aftermath of her disappearance on her family, friends, and on the residents of the town itself, Despite the usual reactionsdesperate searches that go on for days, television appearances and pleasthis book examines the effect of living with the unknown, As a family begins to unravel and each person dealt with the tragedy in their own way, questions are raised about when do you stop the daily searches, how should you react to the press and to friends, and when do you try to begin to move beyond Kim's presumed death and start to rebuild some kind of life.
And Kim's friends have to deal with their relationships with each other and decide how much to tell the family and the authorities about Kim's semisecret teenage life, MY REVIEW OF SONGS FOR THE MISSING BY STEWART ONAN

Although Stewart O'Nan's book SONGS FOR THE MISSING gives the hope and impression of a fast paced, highly anticipated read, it falls short.
Instead, the readers are the ones who will find themselves missing, . . missing out on a better book,

Kim Larsen, preparing to enter college, goes missing the summer before she is to leave, The story introduces Kim and her friends characters fairly well and also leaves little clues of what secrets they may hold, Remember, however, clues are meant to hopefully lead to an eventual answer, These do not. Kim's family, with parents Fran and Ed, are described well and the book really spends a great deal of its time on their reactions and what they do as they try to find Kim.
Also, almost as a side story is the sister, Lindsay, who is trying to be a person on her own, rather just than "Kim's little sister",

O'Nan writes in detail of how both parents go about dealing with trying to find their daughter in their own way, Unless one has been through such a tragic event, it is close to impossible to judge how one should act or feel, And yet, as the reader, one's common sense tends to find some of the parents actions questionable, We see how the parents feel about Kim and all her friends including the boyfriend but are never quite satisfied with any of the openended questions especially as many are never answered.
It is this kind of writing that leads the reader to find it hard to engage themselves with these characters and the story,

In many of O'Nan's other books like LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER, we are entertained and satisfied with his writing, Unfortunately, I was not with SONGS FOR THE MISSING, I expected so much more and just when I thought I would give up on reading the book, it did pull me back in with hopes of what I might find out, but those hopes were quickly dashed.
As I read through to the end of the book, I was left flat and sorry as I felt the end was rushed and had more time been spent in tying up loose ends, the book could have worked better.
I am sure there are some who could find symbolism and comparisons of character studies, but I don't like to have to work quite that hard to read a novel.
Thank you for the opportunity at least to try, Good luck with the next book!
Submitted by Karen Haney, May,
When Stewart O'Nan decides to tell the story of a teenage girl's disappearance, don't go looking for a traditional suspense story instead, he chooses to focus on the emotional impact of that disappearance on the girl's family and her closest friends, and almost everything that pertains to the "crime story" takes place offscreen.
The result is a quietly devastating set of "snapshots" that relentlessly chip away at our expectations of resolution and closure, . . while proving that it's still capable to move on even after unimaginable tragedy, This book took me much longer to read than most books do, I liked the characters and I liked the story line, but found myself bored with the repeativness of the telling of the story, It could have been condensed into a short story for me, An enthralling portrait of one family in the aftermath of a daughter's disappearance,

It was the summer of her Chevette, of J, P. and letting her hair grow, It was also the summer when, without warning, popular high school student Kim Larsen disappeared from her small midwestern town, Her loving parents, her introverted sister, her friends and boyfriend must now do everything they can to find her, As desperate search parties give way to pleading television appearances, and private investigations yield to personal revelations, we see one town's intimate struggle to maintain hope and, finally, to live with the unknown.


Stewart ONan's new novel begins with the suspense and pacing of a thriller and soon deepens into an affecting family drama of loss, On the heels of his critically acclaimed and nationally bestselling Last Night at the Lobster, Songs for the Missing is an honest, heartfelt account of one familys attempt to find their child.
With a soulful empathy for these ordinary heroes, ONan draws us into the world of this small American town and allows us to feel a part of this family, Songs for the Missing is very well written and is perfectly titled, It shatters our illusion of safety in our daily lives and reminds us the world has teeth and is a dangerous place,
It is an exploration of grief and loss through the lives of all those close to Kim after she disappears, Each chapter is told from a different perspective,

I love books that have an emotional impact on me, No book has had a greater emotional impact than this one, The author captured the heaviness of grief, The listlessness of depression. There were times in the middle it was tough to read,

But the author also captures the essence of youth at the onset of the book with the interactions between Kim and her friends and later between Lindsay and hers.
The most memorable part of the book for me was when Lyndsay got a job at Quiznos and was “The Cup”,

ONan masterfully captured all aspects of the challenges and heartaches the characters facedjealousy, living in a siblings shadow, guilt, and of course, loss, The reader rides the same emotional rollercoaster as the family, left feeling mentally, spiritually, and physically drained, But also, we turn the page, finding a way to move forward and somehow continue living, I read about this books in my online upcoming book release newsletters and in Entertainment Weekly, What drew me to it mostly was because when I was in college, a woman my age vanished, She, nor her remains, sadly, has never been found, I felt such compassion for her family and some of her friends, who I worked with at my summer job, I thought maybe reading it would help me process even my very removed sadness for all they went through, and what a community goes through when someone is kidnapped, and also understand a bit better what families go through, in case, God forbid, I ever have to help a family whose loved one disappears.
Also, Stephen King is one of his friends and prereaders, and likes his work a great deal, so that was intriguing to me, as I'm a huge King fan,

I well enjoyed isn't really the right word but was moved by the book, I felt like the writing was done even in such a way that we see "missing" pieces of the family members, friends and community as they cope "the missing" the songs of the missing are about them as well.
It happens abruptly she's in chapter one and then gone, We retrieve pieces of her through the book and their memories, stories and coping, as they retrieve pieces of their lives, Stewart O'Nan is a daredevil minimalist, an ardent student of the things people do in between the exciting things other authors write about, In his most recent novel, Last Night of the Lobster, he described the finalhours of a Red Lobster restaurant in a Connecticut shopping mall, A fire A gunman Legionnaire's disease No, just budget cuts handed down from the main office, The cooks, waitresses and manager all know what's coming, and so do we, It's a story practically allergic to suspense, but the sensitivity of O'Nan's voice makes it strangely compelling,

Now,months later, his new novel, Songs for the Missing, seems like a sellout, The first chapter sets up a classic thriller premise, strewn with ominous clues: A prettyyearold girl named Kim Larsen leaves her friends at the beach and drives to her parttime job at a gas station.
She never arrives. That night her parents notice she hasn't come home, They call her classmates. They call the hospital. They call the police.

We know how this should play out: the accrual of alarming details, mixed with a few false leads growing suspicion that the devoted father/mother/sister/dog is hiding something a horrific vision of the crime from the victim's or the murderer's point of view and finally a shocking revelation.
But O'Nan ignores all these conventions in favor of an approach so mundane you can't believe it works, the thriller equivalent of watching blood dry, He's a connoisseur of waiting, and it's his discipline, his refusal to deviate even for a single sentence from the uneventful, dull terror of losing a child, that makes Songs of the Missing so troubling.


Kim's disappearance is at the heart of this novel, but its real concern is with her family members, They have no way of knowing if they're dealing with a simple misunderstanding, an act of teenage rebellion or a capital crime, Even starting the search in earnest seems to Kim's parents like a horrible admission of disaster, but when the initial round of phone calls

yields nothing, her father, Ed, feels impelled to do something, get in his car and find her.
"They would all laugh at him later, he imagined, Dad freaking out, driving around like a maniac, That was fine with him, as long as she was all right, He didn't expect to see anything, " O'Nan follows the trajectory of Ed's panicked thoughts with quiet sympathy: "He'd felt helpless at times in his life, over money troubles most recently, or, more often, the unhappiness of a loved one.
This was different. His usually reliable talents of hustle and attention to detail were worthless against the unknown, and he was frightened, "

Kim's mother, Fran, is equally afraid, but she reacts differently, As a nurse, "she honored calmness above all, trusting efficiency over emotion, " Most of the novel focuses on the mechanics of their search, which Fran pursues with unwavering selfcontrol, an astute study in the way men and women respond to crisis, "The feeling of uselessness nagged" at Ed, but Fran throws herself into these exhausting routines, if only to forestall a descent into madness, "There was a logical order to their panic," Fran thinks, "Every failure led to the next step, "

Here once again, O'Nan proves himself the patron saint of labor, These frantic parents have so much to do besides worry: assembling lists of names to contact canvassing the town with posters organizing hundreds of volunteers for gridbygrid searches staging a "KareaVan for Kim" ordering buttons, Tshirts and balloons and trolling through thousands of leads that pour in from witnesses, cranks, psychics and wellwishers.
And there are Web sites to monitor and daily blog entries to post a whole industry of grieving parents pedaling scraps of hope to each other around the country,

More depressing is O'Nan's cleareyed portrayal of the media and their doubleedged role in these tragedies, "The networks were hungry for missing girl stories," he writes, Fran realizes early that her daughter's disappearance needs to be marketed to get what she wants: maximum exposure as quickly as possible, Even while terrified by thoughts of what might have happened, she must carefully choose the right clothing "A white blouse would turn into a blob of light" on TV and train herself to deliver an appropriate appeal.
"You don't want to come off as hysterical," a friend advises, "You don't want to be too cool either, It's like advertising. " Kim's sister is pushed into the glare of publicity, too: "You're like a celebrity," a wellmeaning classmate tells her, Stripped of drama, here is the whole tedious, humiliating, heartrending work of searching for a loved one,

What holds our attention through all this is O'Nan's careful focus on the minds of shaken family members trapped in a task that consumes their lives and their livelihood.
"It was how they told time," O'Nan writes, "They'd picked up the awkward yardstick used by new parents, They counted backwards, snagged on that last day, " Forced to go through the motions of hope long after real hope has drained away, they eventually reach that unspeakable place of just wishing it were all over, Ed "no longer looked forward to anything," O'Nan writes, "Pretending to be interested took a constant effort, When he was by himself, he went slack, " In scene after scene, these spare descriptions will make you catch your breath, Some are just frozen moments: Fran sitting in her daughter's car in the garage, "both hands on the wheel, as if she was actually going somewhere, " Others are masterfully designed sequences: Fran shopping all day for Christmas presents, determined to get her missing daughter just the right thing,

In the end, Kim's family receives neither the resolution they hoped for nor the one they feared, The world that O'Nan captures thwarts our expectations for cathartic tragedy or gleeful celebration, which makes the story even more devastating, This isn't the nightmare of losing your daughter this is the numbing reality of it,

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