The Vanishing Season by Jodi Lynn Anderson

The Vanishing Season by Jodi Lynn Anderson
Series: No
Publisher: Harper Teen
Publication Date: July 1st 2014
Source: Edelweiss

Girls started vanishing in the fall, and now winter's come to lay a white sheet over the horror. Door County, it seems, is swallowing the young, right into its very dirt. From beneath the house on Water Street, I've watched the danger swell.

The residents know me as the noises in the house at night, the creaking on the stairs. I'm the reflection behind them in the glass, the feeling of fear in the cellar. I'm tied—it seems—to this house, this street, this town.

I'm tied to Maggie and Pauline, though I don't know why. I think it's because death is coming for one of them, or both.

All I know is that the present and the past are piling up, and I am here to dig.I am looking for the things that are buried.

To say that I was excited for The Vanishing Season is a massive understatement. After reading Tiger Lily at the end of last year I had extremely high expectations for Jodi's next book. The synopsis sounds fantastic and it has all of the elements to be such an amazing book, but it fell flat for me.

Maggie and her family move to the remote village Door County in Wisconsin. Girls are disappearing and turning up dead and no one knows who the killer is. The main thing that fell flat for me in this novel was the characters. I didn't connect to a single one of them and I never really got to know them.
Maggie is basically a 40 year old trapped in a teenagers body. She's so preoccupied with planning her future that she doesn't focus on doing anything fun, which made her kind of boring. Pauline is very child-like. She doesn't like making decisions and she only lives in the moment. It's true what they say about opposites attracting, because Maggie and Pauline instantly became friends the second they met.

The only part of the story that piqued my interest was the killer. I wanted to know why the killer decided to strike all of a sudden and what their motive was. The rest of the story fell flat. I wasn't really interested in the love aspect of the story - Maggie & Liam and Pauline and Liam - and the fact that the story was so slow didn't help either.

I can't really say much else about the story or anything that happened because I don't want to ruin anything. I actually felt like the ending was an anti-climax. Everything had been building up slightly towards the end and then it was just such a meh ending. I honestly didn't feel a thing at the end and I was extremely disappointed because I wanted to love this book so much.

But despite all of that, I found myself unable to put the book down. And the credit for that goes to Jodi Lynn Anderson's beautiful writing style. Yet again I found myself captivated and unable to stop reading the beautiful prose, even though I wasn't particularly enjoying the book.

Overall, The Vanishing Season was a huge disappointment for me. Despite the beautifully written prose, I just couldn't get into this book at all and I really didn't enjoy it. The Vanishing Season has probably been one of the biggest disappointments for me this year.