Book Review - Kate Alice Marshall's Rules For Vanishing
Rules For Vanishing by Kate Alice Marshall
Published by: Viking Books for Young Readers
Publication Date: September 24th, 2019
Format: Kindle, 416 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)
In the town of Briar Glenn the kids play a game. The game is innocent enough. You hold someone's hand, close your eyes, and take thirteen steps. Then a road will appear in the woods and you'll see the ghost of Lucy Gallows. Everyone thought it was just an urban legend. Everyone except Sara's sister Becca. A year ago Becca snuck out to play the game and disappeared. Since then Sara has become withdrawn and preoccupied with the origins of Lucy Gallows. She has pushed away all their mutual friends and obsesses about finding Becca. A few days before the anniversary of Becca's disappearance everyone gets an anonymous text to find a partner, find a key, find the road. In other words, to play the game. The REAL game. This could be what reunites the group. A chance to find Becca. Anthony has been Sara's best friend longer than she can remember and he's secretly in love with Becca, so he agrees to help Sara pull this off despite them barely talking for a year. Then there's Trina and her younger brother. Nick and his girlfriend. Anthony's douchebag best friend. And Sara's crush, Mel. Though Mel has apparently brought not just one but two dates along with her! After one of Mel's dates takes offense to the menage, the group is ready to take the first step. The only problem is, they're an uneven number. The game states you HAVE to have a partner. At this point Sara doesn't care, she's willing to bend or break this rule to find Becca and get on that road and once that road appears, things get real. As real as the stones beneath their feet. From Becca's notes they have to pass through seven gates to get to the end of the road and they are returned home, hopefully finding Becca along the way. The first gate though takes a toll. They lose two people. Because they broke the rules. Which means they can not break any more. But that gets harder and harder as the tasks required of each gate get more complex and dangerous. The road might be asking too much, but if they save Becca and Lucy too, is the price worth it? Only those who love Becca most could say that for sure...
Rules For Vanishing is a YA version of Annihilation. There's even a scene in a lighthouse for Pete's sake. That is the crux of my problem with this book, it's too much other things and never it's own thing. The whole time I was reading it I kept thinking, this reminds me of something but I just can't place it. Probably because the author draws from so many sources you'll see what you connect to most. Here's a bit of Dungeons and Dragons, here's a bit of The Goonies, here's a bit of The Neverending Story, here's a bit of Labyrinth, here's a bit of some other eighties movie that didn't let you sleep for months. On a side note, what was it about "children's" movies in the eighties that they seemed to be purposefully designed to traumatize us? If the story had leaned into the urban legend part of the setup and veered away from the very Lovecraftian named city of Ys as the road's destination, maybe this would have worked for me. And yes, I know it's actually a legend from Brittany, hence all those French books in the aforementioned lighthouse, but Dahut was doing it with Cthulhu wasn't she? Also, the faux-documentary style likened to The Blair Witch Project in the book's blurb... well, I've seen it done better. I like that they try to incorporate many forms of media from recordings to written transcripts to cellphone footage, it's just, as I said, I've seen it done better. There's something a little clunky about how it's handled here. It's like Kate Alice Marshall is trying too hard to keep certain things hidden and not show her hand that the writing suffers. The story should be first, the gimmicks should be second. But what I did like was the representation in this book. In the gang of teenagers that go into the woods we have at least two LGBTQ characters, two different minorities, and two different disabilities. I felt like that this not only gave anyone reading the book someone to identify with, but it also felt more real. My friends are diverse and it's rare that we get to see this in literature. So while there where things I didn't like, tropes that were overdone, at the same time I want to point at the book and tell others that THIS is what needs to be seen more often! THIS is true representation!
If last fall, after I'd watched a few episodes of the "dark reboot" of Nancy Drew, you'd tell me it would end up being my favorite adaptation of the year I would have laughed at you. Yes, I admit I'm all about the "dark reboot" having devoured the first season of Riverdale over a harsh weekend in 2017, but a dark Nancy Drew? Sure I was interested, but not sure I'd be hooked. I viewed it as a nice Wednesday night paring with Riverdale. But as Riverdale's quality continued to tank I looked more and more at Nancy Drew to be my Wednesday fix to get me through the rest of the week. Though I do applaud Riverdale for the nice twist of fate in that they were doing their own Hardy Boys tribute with this season's Baxter Brothers. A coincidence? Hell no. Do I care? Not as long as it entertained me. So what changed? What made me push aside an old favorite and choose a mildly diverting show about the residents of Horseshoe Bay, Maine, and the recent high school grads working at The Bayside Claw, a perennially failing restaurant? Much like Perry Mason, this isn't your parent's Nancy Drew, but I think that's why it works. And aside from the fact that it grows on you, I loved that the mysteries they tackled each week made all the characters personally involved. Their history, their backstory, their past relationships, everything tied into the narrative to make this bay side community rife with crime and more importantly the supernatural. The fact that the supernatural is real here still makes me giddy. It's not just hinted at or intimated, ghosts are REAL! And I love me some ghosts and ghouls. What's more, Nancy is being haunted by the ghost of Dead Lucy, the local urban legend which is very much based in truth and very much important to Nancy's backstory. Yet, my favorite character, hand's down, is George's mother, Victoria Fan, played by Liza Lapira. George was Nancy's former nemesis and now boss and George's mother knows everything there is to know about the supernatural. She's usually drunk and hostile because she's trying to shut herself off from the supernatural goings-on, but when she strolls into the Claw, you know it's going to be a kick ass episode. I would watch a show just about her! Until that day I at least have Nancy Drew. 
