The Year of Fog (Hardcover)

by Michelle Richmond (Author)
Key Phrases: dead seal pup, yellow van, Ocean Beach, Costa Rica, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In this spare page-turner, Richmond (Dream of the Blue Room) draws complex tensions from a the set setup of a child gone missing. Photographer Abby Mason stops on San Francisco's Ocean Beach with her fiancé Jake's six-year-old daughter, Emma, to photograph a seal pup; by the time Abby looks up, Emma has disappeared. Abby, who narrates, flashes back to her growing relationship with high school teacherJake, and sketches its transformation over the course of the search. Emma's mother, Lisbeth (who abandoned the family three years earlier), wants back into Jake's life—even as he is giving up hope on finding Emma. Abby delves into the bereft missing children subculture and into the vagaries of memory. A hypnotist helps Abby unearth promising details of that singular last day with Emma, but the information requires major follow-through from Abby. The book's twist on missing child stories is wholly effective. Richmond develops the principle characters, and Abby's dysfunctional parents make for sharply drawn secondaries, as do local surfers. The book is beautifully paced—one feels Abby's clarity of purpose from the first page. The sure-handed denouement reflects the focus and restraint that Richmond brings to bear throughout. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Richmond's sophomore effort (after Dream of the Blue Room, 2003) traces a traumatic year in the life of photographer Abby Mason after she loses her fiance's six-year-old daughter. The moment Abby stopped to photograph a dead baby seal while walking on a fog-bound beach in San Francisco is one she will replay in her head a thousand times. That's the last time she saw Emma, who was racing ahead, eager to collect sand dollars. Panic and fear soon give way to sheer exhaustion and emotional shutdown as Abby and Emma's dad, Jake, immerse themselves in the desperate search for the missing first-grader. As the months tick by, Jake becomes convinced that Emma drowned, while Abby is sure that Emma was kidnapped. The trauma and the guilt wreak havoc with their relationship and with their struggle to regain a sense of normalcy. Richmond gracefully explores the nature of memory and perception in key passages that never slow the suspense of the search. Closely echoing Jacquelyn Mitchard's best-selling Deep End of the Ocean (1996), this is a page-turner with a philosophical bent. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Delacorte Press (March 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385340117
• ISBN-13: 978-0385340113
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (95 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #454,210 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars when a child goes missing, June 16, 2007

By	lisatheratgirl "lisatheratgirl" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This is a book about a parent's worst nightmare. Unlike similar books, such as Beth Gutcheon's Still Missing, this book goes beyond the facts of a girl who disappears. The father, Jake, sticks to a police-procedural approach in trying to locate his daughter, sending out flyers, offering a reward, setting up a web site, appearing on television and radio. But Abby, Jake's fiance, feels responsible for the girl's disappearance and takes a much more imaginative approach. The themes of the book are presented through Abby's eyes. One is memory, recall of details, hypnosis, looking for clues that might have been overlooked. Abby and her friend Nell study the workings of memory, amnesia, the inability to forget. Another is the passing of time and the artificiality of time. The police say the longer a child is missing, the less likely he/she will turn up alive. Jake accepts this, Abby studies what time may mean. Abby is a photographer and looks for clues in her pictures. Jake and Abby are in agony, and I feel the story is realistic, including what eventually happens. There are different possibilities when a child disappears. She may eventually be found alive, like Elizabeth Smart in Utah. That doesn't mean she's undamaged. She may be found dead, like the child of one of the characters in a support group in the book. A child may be dead, but it can turn out there was no abduction, like the case of two boys in Milwaukee, Wisconsin last year. After a nationwide search, the boys were found accidentally drowned in McGovern Park lagoon in their own neighborhood. And then there are the children who are never found and the family never knows what happened. Jake wants closure, Abby refuses to give up. Although some people think the book is slow moving, time could really drag for parents in this situation. I couldn't put the book down and found it interesting up to the end. I think this could turn out to be one of the best books of the year.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Really, Really GOOD Book, May 5, 2007

By	Steven James (Washington State) - See all my reviews

I thoroughly enjoyed this heartwrenching book about loss, memory and photography. I could relate well to the main characters and could identify with their emotions and choices. The plot moved at a quick clip and I found myself staying up way too late each night so I could read "one more chapter", fortunately the chapters were very short. Although the story is primarily about a lost child, I learned a lot of useful information about memory and photography along the way. I am a special education teacher and I was interested in many of the theories of memory that were interspersed throughout the entire novel. It's always a bonus when a book read for entertainment takes on an educational bent and provides me with new insights that may help in my profession. Overall, I gave this book 4 stars because it dragged on a tad too long and the ending, while moderately fulfilling, could have packed more of a punch.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unstoppable, May 1, 2007

By	K. G. Schneider "Librarian, Writer, and Booka... (Tallahassee, FL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Love, landscape, desire, loss, fear, and San Francisco: Richmond binds these ingredients into a cake at once rich and finely-grained, sweet but never cloying.

What pulls you in first is the voice: "Here is the truth, this is what I know ..." But The Year of Fog is more than beautifully written; it is almost cruelly suspenseful. The night I buried myself in The Year of Fog, I had to skip ahead and read the ending (and what an ending--satisfying and surprising) in order to get some sleep.

Full disclosure: Richmond was my writing instructor several years ago. I was surprised to read an essay by her in the San Francisco Chronicle commenting that after her first novel she didn't think she would write another. I am already waiting for her next haunting story.