The Vanishing of Katharina Linden/Helen Grant

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden by Helen Grant; mystery, suspense, magical realism; 304 pages (about 7.5 hours on CD)

In the past week, I've book talked this novel to just about anyone who will listen, and forced our copy onto one of my coworkers. This is a great book, and while I don't think I can do it justice here, I'm gonna try.

This story is set in 1998 in the small German town of Bad Munstereifel, where the most exciting thing to happen in the last decade was a fight between the local tom cat and an overfed dachshund. But in the spring of that year, during the annual Carnival festival, 10-year-old Katharina Linden disappears. To Pia, a girl in Katharina's class, it seems like something out of a fairy tale: there one minute, and gone the next; but as time passes, Katharina is not found, and other girls start to go missing as well. Pia and her friend Stefan are convinced something supernatural is at work, and they take it upon themselves to investigate.

While this isn't a true "magical realist" novel, it definitely has the feel of one: Pia and Stefan have been raised on local legends and ghost stories (all real stories about the (also real) town, according to the author), so it only seems logical to them that one of the local boogeymen must be responsible. Several of those stories are retold in this book, and are done so well as to seriously scare me one night while I was driving home. To two imaginative children, even mundane things can start to take on supernatural qualities, and that's much of what happens in the book. Combined with the setting, and timeless feel (there are no computers or cell phones, and few mentions of cars or even land line phones), this could have been a fairy tale in and of itself (albeit one of the original Grimm stories, not the bowdlerized versions we tell today). The ending is bittersweet and all too real, but for all that it was sad, it was the right ending for this story.

As a final note, the audio edition of this book was wonderful. The British narrator captures both the English and German sides of Pia's family, and handles the German words and phrases throughout the book particularly well (better than I would have, had I been reading it). Highly recommended to readers who enjoy folklore and strong settings.