Safe and Sound by Laura McHugh

 

So, I'm clearly well on my way to being a big fan of Ms. McHugh. She writes well, and her stories are intricate and dense without being laden with Shocking Twists and other assorted rugpulls. This novel is structurally a lot like The Weight of Blood in that it's in two timelines, but there's a lot less of the bildungsroman in this. I mean, all the protagonists are young--like, senior in high school young--but this is not so much a novel about growing up as it is about getting away. Ms. McHugh tends to set her novels in small towns (in a relatively narrow patch of America) and she seems to know them in her bones--and she at least at times does not seem to like them. Given the way the small town in this novel seems to gather itself to punish anyone with the nerve to want to leave, I'm strongly inclined to say she doesn't.