The Vanishing Moment (Margaret Wild, A&U)

A weeping girl, a haunted somnambulist and a mysterious magician named Bob—Margaret Wild’s latest YA novel is a riveting exploration of the measure of human life and happiness, worlds away from her teenage verse novels Jinx and One Night. This enigmatic prose tale asks if, given the chance, we would trade our life for another, and follows two girls with tangled fates: Arrow, who is struggling to find direction after a traumatic childhood event, and Marika, whose promising future collapses when her half-brother disappears. At the site of a terrible crime lies the chance to change everything. Dancing around the idea of parallel lives, this book is closer to the magical realism of, say, Audrey Niffenegger or Ray Bradbury than to science-fiction proper. Like Marika, an artist who wants to ‘sculpt a vanishing’, Wild captures the agony of loss on the page. Though focussing on acceptance and endurance, she examines deeper unanswerable questions around the ‘vanishing moments’ of life—childhood, innocence, memory, identity, being and nothingness. This is a short but poignant novel for older teens with an underlying message that great love bears enormous risk, and we must always be careful what we wish for.

Meredith Lewin is a freelance reviewer and proofreader who has worked for a children’s publisher