The Weight of Silence, by Heather Gudenkauf

Two little girls are missing.

Petra’s parents make the discovery first: their seven-year-old daughter is not in her bed one morning. They beeline over to their neighbor’s house to see if Petra is with her best friend, Callie—but Callie is nowhere to be found.

We as readers know where Callie has gone. Her abusive lout of a father, with the logic of a very drunk man in the very early morning, has decided to take Callie out for a punishing stroll through the woods. Her crime? Callie won’t speak. For three years she has been mute.

But Callie’s frantic mother doesn’t know where her daughter is, nor does her older brother. And nobody at all knows where Petra might be—though we can’t help but think back to the young girl who was murdered last year, not too far from these parts.

Gudenkauf’s debut sizzles with suspense. The plotting moves at just the right pace, with little pieces of the story falling into place in carefully controlled doses. Making the story particularly intense is the use of the present tense. Usually this approach comes off as gimmicky, but in this novel it works. Each chapter is told in the present from the point of view of a different character (Callie’s mother Toni, Callie’s brother Ben, Petra’s father Martin, policeman Louis, even Petra herself). Callie also gets her own chapters, though hers alone are told in the past tense. Add in some dark family secrets and some tragic cases of misunderstandings and missed connections, and you’ve got a gripping story.

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