Andromeda Romano-Lax has been a journalist, a travel writer, and a serious amateur cellist. She is the author of The Spanish Bow, The Detour, and Behave, among others.
[The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow; The Page 69 Test: The Detour; Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax (February 2012)]
Romano-Lax's new novel The Deepest Lake, set in Guatemala, is about a mother’s search for answers about her missing daughter.
At CrimeReads the author tagged four "emotional page-turners that convinced me the missing-child trope is both powerful and capacious, with room for further writerly exploration and interpretation." One title on the list:
Lisa Jewell, The Night She DisappearedRead about the other entries on the list.
In Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared, we arrive at the story of a teen old enough to be a mother herself. Tallulah, 19, has gone on a date, leaving her baby in the care of her mother, Kim. Then Tallulah disappears. Kim has a hardtime believing Tallulah would take off without her child, but then again, young adults are unpredictable.
Having thoroughly enjoyed my fill of mother-and-child stories in which the very young victim is unquestionably innocent, I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to novels like these precisely because the missing teen or young adult plays a more active and ambiguous role. Our grown or nearly-grown children sneak out, take risks, befriend the wrong people. They fail to answer emails and texts. They try on new identities. They make dangerous mistakes.
On top of that, everything we think we know about our older children relies on the interpretation of spotty memories. How serious was that crisis she had as a freshman in college? What was that argument we had last summer? A certain tone, a look, a silence—these are the clues which only a parent, not a P.I., can decipher.
--Marshal Zeringue
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