BOOK REVIEW: The Missing Years by Lexie Elliott @elliott_lexie @berkleypub @corvusbooks #themissingyears #bookreview

Steeped in small town folklore and filled with atmospheric suspense, I absolutely loved Lexie Elliott’s second novel, The Missing Years! Revolving around a decades old disappearance and an inherited house that seems to have a presence all of its own, The Missing Years was a book that I lost myself into each time I picked it up. A fantastic novel of suspense playing with the bounds of magic, legend, and how we fill in the missing pieces of our lives.

About the Book

An eerie, old Scottish manor in the middle of nowhere that’s now hers.

Ailsa Calder has inherited half of a house. The other half belongs to a man who disappeared without a trace twenty-seven years ago—her father.

Leaving London behind to settle the inheritance from her mother’s estate, Ailsa returns to her childhood home, nestled amongst the craggy peaks of the Scottish Highlands, joined by the half-sister who’s almost a stranger to her.

Ailsa can’t escape the claustrophobic feeling that the house itself is watching her—as if her past hungers to consume her. She also can’t ignore how the neighbourhood animals refuse to set one foot within the gates of the garden.

When the first nighttime intruder shows up, Ailsa fears that the manor’s careless rugged beauty could cost her everything. 

Reflection

As soon as the protagonist Ailsa Calder pulls up to the Manse, the house she half-inherited from her mother, I was drawn into the book. The Manse is somewhat gothic, but with strangely cheery décor inside—a fact that several characters comment on being “not the right way”. The Manse seems to have a story to tell. It is almost a living, breathing character in the book.

The shadow looming over the Manse and the book itself is the disappearance of Ailsa’s father nearly 3 decades earlier. Her father didn’t just disappear, he disappeared in scandal, taking an item of extreme value with him and becoming part of the town’s lore. Did he steal the item? Was he murdered for it? Was he a spy? The mystery of Ailsa’s father—the owner of the other half of the Manse—felt like a weight that pulled Ailsa into the Manse and the local town itself. Everyone in town knows the story and Ailsa finds herself returning to a place where opinions of her and her parents linger, even though they’d left long before.

From the first night Ailsa is uneasy in the Manse, though her half sister Carrie seems to feel right at home. The relationship between the sisters was such an intriguing part of the story. They are different ages and don’t know each other as adults really, since Ailsa left her mother’s home at eighteen and scarcely returned. Ailsa wants to be close with Carrie, but she isn’t sure quite how to get there. Their relationship is delicate, fragmented at the smallest misstep. I admit I wondered exactly who to side with her, since at times I found Carrie to be incredibly moody, and other times I found Ailsa to be stiff and closed off.

The local townspeople are such a fantastic element to the story. The Manse is in a small Scottish countryside town filled with craggy peaks, dark and menacing forest, and local lore that seems to take the place of reality at times. What’s so engaging about this book is the way the lore can never be quite discounted. As outsiders, we want to believe that there is a rational, grounded explanation for everything in the book. But the mystery of the Manse and the town lore…well I never felt like it could totally be brushed aside.

How do we fill in the missing blanks in our lives? We come up with explanations for why things occur. This happens frequently throughout the book, and is mirrored by the sections in between chapters where Ailsa herself attempts to fill in the blanks from the disappearance of her father with theories about where he has been. For why he never came for her. For the missing years…

Thank you so much to Berkley for my copy. Opinions are my own.