I liked the idea of The Summer She Vanished but it could have done with some editing.

There was a fair amount of repetition—for example the main character, Maggie, thought things like “why didn’t I think of that” about nearly every revelation. The American characters also used a lot of British terminology like “smallhold” that just aren’t used in the US. The author does appear to be UK-based and Maggie was supposed to have grown up in the US before moving to the UK as a teenager but the people in her American hometown should have used local terminology.

I felt like the timeline was a little wonky—her aunt disappeared in 1972 and it wasn’t 100% clear to me when the book took place. There were some details like when her former classmate wrote an article that seemed too far back for that to be possible at their current ages and a good number of parents of people who were adults in 1972 were still alive. Technically that’s possible but it would be very tight given some of the exact ages shared.

I felt like the inspiration for the book had to be the famous 1969 unsolved mystery of Baltimore’s Sister Catherine Cesnik of which a whole docuseries has been made but that wasn’t mentioned in the acknowledgements. The circumstances are nearly identical.

I did like the characters and the mother-daughter dynamic is one that we haven’t seen a lot of in mysteries—her mother was very unkind but as we learned, had a lot of secrets. I also liked how the book explored a town going from small town to one that had expanded and gentrified quite a bit over about 15 years. I would have liked to have seen some of the side characters fleshed out a little more.