Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, Alison Espach

Spanning 15 years, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance gives us Sally as she talks to her sister Kathy before and after Kathy dies. From the musings of a preteen to a grown woman, she tells of the relationship with her sister and life and everything between.

A good portion of this book read as YA/Coming of Age. As a child, Sally is very naïve, and her musings reflect such. She portrayed her grief and her enduring crush realistically. She not only lost a sister, but she lost a mother who was so engulfed in her grief that she shut her living daughter out. Espach wrote the story in equal parts, amusing and touching, and it is written well. Thank you, Henry Holt and Co., for sending this along!

Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is available for preorder on Amazon, Bookshop, and B&N, it releases May 17th.

About the Book

For much of her life, Sally Holt has been mystified by the things her older sister, Kathy, seems to have been born knowing. Kathy has answers for all of Sally’s questions about life, about love, and about Billy Barnes, a rising senior and local basketball star who mans the concession stand at the town pool. The girls have been fascinated by Billy ever since he jumped off the roof in elementary school, but Billy has never shown much interest in them until the summer before Sally begins eighth grade. By then, their mutual infatuation with Billy is one of the few things the increasingly different sisters have in common. Sally spends much of that summer at the pool, watching in confusion and excitement as her sister falls deeper in love with Billy—until a tragedy leaves Sally’s life forever intertwined with his.

Opening in the early nineties and charting almost two decades of shared history and missed connections, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is both a breathtaking love story about two broken people who are unexplainably, inconveniently drawn to each other and a wryly astute coming-of-age tale brimming with unexpected moments of joy.

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