The Missing

by Melanie Florence

Overview

After a girl she knows from school goes missing and is found dead in the Red River, Feather is shocked when the police write it off as a suicide. Then, it's Feather's best friend, Mia, who vanishes but Mia's mom and abusive stepfather paint Mia as a frequent runaway, so the authorities won't investigate her disappearance either. Everyone knows that Native girls are disappearing and being killed, but no one is connecting the dots.

When Feather's brother Kiowa is arrested under suspicion of Mia's abduction, Feather knows she has to clear his name. What Feather doesn't know is that the young serial killer who has taken Mia has become obsessed with Feather, and her investigation is leading her into terrible danger.

Using as its background the ongoing circumstance of unsolved cases of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, this fictional thriller set in Winnipeg explores one teenager's response to a system that has long denied and misrepresented the problem.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459410862
Publisher:	James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Publishers
Publication date:	02/12/2016
Sold by:	De Marque
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	782 KB
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

MELANIE FLORENCE is a proud Cree and a full-time writer currently based in Toronto. She is the author of the Righting Canada's Wrongs: Residential Schools, the YA novel The Missing, the Lorimer SideStreets title One Night, and Recordbooks title Jordin Tootoo: The Highs and Lows in the Journey of the First Inuk to Play in the NHL, which was chosen as an Honor Book by The American Indian Library Association. As a freelance journalist, Melanies byline has appeared in magazines including Dance International, Writer, Parents Canada, and Urban Male Magazine.

Editorial Reviews

2016-07-20
Feather’s life is changed when one friend and then another go missing.The Cree high school student lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, with her single, successful mom and her brother, Kiowa, studying to be a doctor. Her friends, other Aboriginal young women, are not so lucky. Carli, the first to disappear and later mistakenly be ruled a suicide, has lived with many foster families. Mia, the second, lives with her neglectful mom and sexual-predator stepfather. Feather and her family and friends are modern, urban Natives whose lives are far from “the rez” but who are aware of the gulf between them and white society. Feather’s mom says about people in power: “They believe that we are bringing it on ourselves. They think women in our community deserve to be victimized just because of the colour of our skin.” In fact, Kiowa is erroneously arrested in Mia’s case, launching the mystery plot. Feather tries to get her brother out of jail and find the real killer, putting herself in danger when she tries to lure the killer. Issues drive the plot (a subplot concerns homophobia aimed at one of Feather’s friends) in this very brief contemporary novel, making for an informative, swift read but an unsatisfying mystery. Feather’s first-person narration is punctuated by the killer’s effectively creepy thoughts about his victims, raising tension, but a deus ex machina ending both thwarts earthly justice and cheats readers. Well-meaning but unsatisfying. (Mystery. 14-18)

Kirkus Reviews