“How to Disappear Completely and Never be Found”, by Sara Nickerson

Nickerson, Sara, and Sally Wern Comport. How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Print.

This was a rare case of me giving a book to a kid to read without reading it myself, and it totally backfired.  Said child got up to about page 60, but then never got any further.  I started it myself the other night at bedtime to see what it was like, and I loved it – I read the whole thing that night, staying up far too late!

The main character is a middle-school-aged girl who has problems at home – her father is dead and her mother sound clinically depressed to me, from the description.  It turns out that the mother owns a creepy old house, and the mystery of how it came to be hers is what kicks off the action of the book.  Nickerson has written a book that kept fooling me into thinking it was going to play into a predictable type, but never did – weaving elements of mystery, horror, graphic novels and fantasy together (without ever asking for a suspension of disbelief) and bringing it all to a satisfying conclusion.  Scholastic ranks this at a Grade 6 level, and I think that’s appropriate, although it was clearly beyond my Grade 6 tester.

The best analogy I can come up with is to E. L. Konigsberg, although LibraryThing suggests Gordon Korman and Jerry Spinelli as recommendations.