Starred review from July 4, 2022
In Lin-Greenberg’s superb collection (after Faulty Predictions), dramatic scenes play out between students and teachers. Alice, a veteran college art teacher, wearily ferries her stuffed birds to the students’ studio for a drawing exercise. There, Alice notices the popular, younger art teacher gathering Alice’s own students for a different project when they should be drawing the birds, and Alice responds unexpectedly. In “Roland Raccoon,” an elderly middle school teacher keeps a blind and nearly deaf raccoon named Roland as a pet and brings him in for show and tell. In “Lost or Damaged,” the narrator, a high school student, follows the lead of her controlling best friend, Arielle. They observe a boy’s act of kindness toward new student Olga, and jealousy prompts Arielle to smear Olga’s reputation after she is made first chair in the orchestra instead of Arielle. The narrator is torn—she knows Olga suffers from Arielle’s insults, but feels tethered to her friend—up to a point. Lin-Greenberg’s flawless and insightful prose gives an acute sense of the characters’ perspectives as they change. This accomplished work is full of surprises.
July 15, 2022
A rich tapestry of stories set in upstate New York. The stories here are seemingly unrelated except for their geography. But the shared themes of regret, dissatisfaction, loneliness, and connection make this collection feel interwoven and purposeful. Some stories are more successful than others, and the poignancy of "Migration," "Lost or Damaged," and the titular "Vanished" make the stumbles (such as the unsatisfying "Since Vincent Left") more noticeable. That said, in bite-sized tales, Lin-Greenberg mostly gives us multidimensional characters. In "Roland Raccoon," there's a teacher who can't distance herself from her adolescent mean-girl experiences; "Vanished" features a college student who won't bring herself to welcome her roommate but later clings to the first words that roommate wrote her when the pandemic (and a murder they witnessed) separated them; and in "Migration," a hoarding woman who is just attached enough to reality dismisses the thought that her estranged daughter might be visiting the family to ask for an organ donation: "She wouldn't want a part of any of them floating around inside her body." Overall, the success of this book is most apparent in the endings. Lin-Greenberg does not wrap up her stories neatly with bows. Instead she shows the reader a more truthful and profound reality: characters who don't get the chance to redeem themselves and stories that leave more questions unanswered than not: "Now, when I look back on my early years, it's not what I did that I regret, but rather how much I did not do." Thoughtful, wry, and bittersweet.
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