48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister

Written by Joyce Carol Oates

Narrated by Sarah Welborn

When a woman mysteriously vanishes, her sister must tally up the clues to discover her fate.



Marguerite, a beautiful woman, has disappeared from her small town in Upstate New York. But is foul play involved? Or did she merely take an opportunity to get away for fun, or finally make the decision to leave behind her claustrophobic life of limited opportunities?



Her younger sister Gigi wonders if the flimsy silk Dior dress, so casually abandoned on the floor, is a clue to Marguerite's having seemingly vanished. The police examine the footprints made by her Ferragamo boots leaving the house, ending abruptly, and puzzle over how that can help lead to her. Gigi, not so pretty as her sister, slowly reveals her hatred for the perfect, much-loved, Marguerite.



Bit by bit, like ripping the petals off a flower blossom, revelations about both sisters are uncovered. Subtly, but with the unbearable suspense at which Joyce Carol Oates excels, clues mount up to bring to light the fate of the missing beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Mar 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781696611770

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've read a lot of JCO's books over the years, and I've liked most of them, loved more than a few and I've always admired her writing. I'm not sure how she keeps plugging away (she's well into her 80's) I think, and though I'm not far behind her in age and I read her works regularly, I'm sure I have not read even half of her output. (Wiki tells me she's written more than 70 books).

This one was her latest, at least I think it was at the time I read it, and it is very gothic. It reminded me very much of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived In The Castle. Set in a small town in upstate New York, we have a younger sister, Georgene, clearly an unreliable narrator, telling the story of her family, and what happened some 15 years previously when her beautiful and talented older sister Marguerite disappeared on her way to a local college where she was a professor of art.

Interesting characters are created, and there is an involving plot as well as things to puzzle out, all the while trying to figure out what games, conscious or unconscious, our narrator Georgene (and behind her author Oates) is playing with us.

Recommended.
3 1/2 stars

First Line: "Silky white fabric. Bodiless."
Last Line: "Dear Sister, Wait! I am almost there."

Factoid: In the afterword (or maybe I read it on Wiki?) it is stated that 600,000 people disappear annually in the US, and of these 90,000 are never found. This doesn't mean they are all murdered, but there is this quote: "The earth is bloody with the bodies of raped, murdered, cast-aside women and girls."

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Marguerite's younger sister begins with her last glimpse of her older, glamorous sister and tells the story of what happened after Marguerite disappeared somewhere between the home she'd moved back to after her mother's death to care for her father and younger sister, and the local college where she worked as an artist-in-residence. M. is beautiful and talented and her disappearance brings a lot of attention to their town and to Gigi and her father. Gigi is very different from her sister, not a beauty and unlike her sister, whose art career is taking off, Gigi works as a clerk in the post office. Gigi begins to explore her sister's life, finding surprises in a sketchbook and in the attentions of a man who claims to have been her sister's mentor.

Joyce Carol Oates is playing to her strengths with this novel. There's the young woman both repelled and drawn to an over-bearing man, there's the distant father, there's that sense of being uncomfortable in one's own body and, more than anything, JCO's writing style that gives everything an off-kilter feel, a touch of the creepy. All those things are why I like JCO's writing so much and yet, here, they fail to deliver. JCO is pulling out all the usual tricks, but this novel feels like she's just going through the motions. She's written dozens of books like this one and, for once, it shows. It's not a bad book, but there are so very many better books by her out there. She is an extraordinary author who has written a remarkable number of books so a rare stumble is no doubt to be expected, although her mistakes are usually ones where she takes a chance and fails, not when she's writing to her strengths. A bad book by JCO is still better than most other books, but she's written far better books.

[pdebolt_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although a long-time JCO fan, I couldn’t give this novel more than 3 stars due to the unlikeable character of G and the ambiguity of the ending. She is a brilliant writer and I always look forward to her new books, but this one was a disappointment.