Island of Lost Girls - Jennifer McMahon

Island of Lost Girls definitely has a thing about rabbits. And submarines - rabbits and submarines. And Peter Pan. Jennifer McMahon however works and reworks these recurring motifs throughout this intriguing and thoroughly readable little thriller, which is as much about coming to terms with the past as it is in solving the puzzle of a missing girl who has been abducted by a giant white rabbit. 

Yep, that's right, a giant white rabbit. Now anyone who watches movies will know that giant rabbits are never the sign of anything good - think Donnie Darko, Sexy Beast, even Harvey - but even in literature they have certain connotations on account of Alice in Wonderland, and indeed, the use of rabbits here (and submarines, and Peter Pan) all have a lot to do with childhood and childhood secrets, deep dark metaphorical burrows where one can hide from those fears of a threatening adult world that we are not really ready or capable of dealing with. 

What's great then about Island of Lost Girls is that it doesn't approach the investigation into the missing girl from the normal police procedural and rational gathering of evidence point of view. The novel is not specifically female oriented, but the main character Rhonda Farr nevertheless takes a very female approach, sensing undercurrents and trusting in her intuition - and though she might not always be right in her assumptions, through her mixing of impressions, her dreams of rabbits and submarines, and her obsessing over an incident in the past with her friends and a childhood sweetheart, Rhonda connects to the emotional truth more accurately than any attempt to make logical sense of it all. 

Jennifer McMahon similarly runs with impressions - starting the novel even from a child's view of the world - while also finding a strong structure that successfully blends these unusual and disparate recurrent elements into something meaningful through the accumulation of character detail and the connections that she forges between the past and present. The case of one missing girl then becomes the case of several lost girls, Rhonda herself perhaps among them, searching to make some sense of the past, leaving her childhood behind and perhaps finding a way to move forward.