Customer Reviews

Watch Me Disappear

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Watch me disappear has everything you can ask for from a novel: it's compelling, engaging, moving and it draws you imperceptibly into another person's life while at the same time shedding light on your own.

Tina Humber lives a seemingly enviable existence: she's a successful English-born marine biologist who has made a life for herself in the United States with a loving partner and a happy, gifted daughter.

Yet when she accepts an invitation to go to her brother's marriage in the Fenland home of her youth, she is taking on more than a simple familial obligation. She is about to revisit a childhood world in which her school friend Mandy Baker goes missing, never to be seen again. This is a place where innocence is shattered and the dark secrets of family life seem to threaten even her own survival.

Watch me disappear is the fifth novel by the Whitbread and Orange Prize nominated author Jill Dawson whose previous works include Fred and Edie and Wild Boy. The characters, landscapes, dialogue and imagery are natural yet eerily haunting throughout; it's a work seems to move effortlessly from the page into the recesses of the reader's mind, yet clearly it can't have been an easy subject for a mother-of-two to enter into so profoundly.

Much like dreams themselves, the inherent elusiveness of memory is a constant theme throughout a novel which refuses to give simple, two-dimensional solutions to traumatic childhood events viewed through an adult's subjective perspective.

Despite the fragmentary and sometimes ghostlike nature of Tina's recollections, Watch me disappear gains much of its power from the sharp and often amusing descriptions of an English girl's life as she enters adolescence in the early 1970s and the agricultural world that surrounds her.

The whole thing is beautifully composed as Dawson shows complete mastery of period detail and in-depth knowledge of the seahorses which are the focal point of Tina's professional life and also an ongoing metaphor for her threatened existence.

Nevertheless, unlike some other well-researched novels, the scientific and historical insights provided in this book never distract from a gripping narrative drive and characterisations that carry you through to the last page and beyond.

Much like the experiences of the central character herself, the dreams and images of this novel are likely to stay in your conscious and subconscious mind for a long time after you've finished Watch me disappear.

Buy this book - you won't find a better read this year.

Found this really hard to get into. The author jumps all over the place with memories. She doesn't flower up scenes too much but I just can't get into it. The narrator is excellent she deserves 5 stars brilliant but a very below average story. sorry. won't even bother to try any more of this authors.