Book Review: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

You must read The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell. Must.

You know how some books are so good you can't put them down? This one was so good I had to put it down the first night. Drop it like it's hot, if you will. It was too much to take.

But still I managed to finish it in less than 24 hours. Yeah, me. The one with the baby, and the other job, too, who can't always figure out when to shower.

I gave it to my cousin with a request to get it back before Book Club (still 3 weeks away), as the book had been chosen by the lovely Adrienne for our next discussion. She gave it back to me last Saturday. She'd stayed up all night reading it.

So what is it about, you ask? It is a novel about the power of perception, the reliability (or unreliability) of memory, the way we sometimes forget that the people we love are more important than the opinions of people we really don't care all that much about. It's about the walls that we build to deal with loss in its many forms. It's about the subordination of women.

This book crosses generations and continents, and it's told in a remarkable way.

Read it.