“The Search” tell the story of the original vanishing girl.
In Lauren Oliver’s upcoming YA thriller VANISHING GIRLS, sisters Nick and Dara have a strained relationship in the fallout of a major accident… until the day Dara mysteriously disappears. But Dara isn’t the first girl to go missing from their quiet town.
Oliver’s prequel short “The Search” shows the aftermath of 11-year-old Madeline Snow’s disappearance long before Dara. After much fan buzz, part two of the story has been unlocked!
READ PART 1 HERE
Part 2 Excerpt:
Finally, one of the cops hops the sea wall and gestures for our attention. He might as well have fired a gun. We go quiet all at once. Coralee, mid- whispered sentence about the fact that Sarah Snow doesn’t look half as upset as she should—if it were my sister, I’d never be just standing there—lets the rest of the words curl up, withering, in her throat, like a caterpillar lodged in her vocal chords.
The cop, Lieutenant Frank Hernandez, reviews the facts of Madeline Snow’s disappearance: sometime between 10:00 p.m. and 10:45 p.m. on the evening of July 19, Madeline Snow disappeared from the backseat of Sarah Snow’s car while Sarah and Kennedy were in the Big Scoop getting ice cream. We hold our breath, waiting for a new detail, a final screw to nail the whole story into place, to give it purpose and sense. But there are no new details. Just the same old story, the sudden disappearance of a girl from her sister’s car. A book breaking off mid-sentence. A story that stops making sense, that turns from English into a new language, something old and frightening, a language we’d prefer to forget.
We move over the sea wall and fan out, standing close enough that we could touch shoulders if we lifted our arms. The water foams in the sand, spitting out paper bags and old cigarette stubs, trading them for more trash, slurping up pebbles to wear down over time into nothing. More than one of us thinks, irrationally, of Madeline Snow appearing in the waves, like a mythological creature, like a goddess sent to shore in a seashell. But for most of us, the drumbeat of hopelessness returns. She’s gone, the ocean seems to say. She’s gone. Give up.
READ THE REST HERE!
VANISHING GIRLS hits shelves on March 10th.
