Ohlin, Alix. The missing person, a novel.

OHLIN, Alix. The missing person, a novel. Random House, Vintage Contemporaries. 292p. c2005. 1-4000-3138-9. $13.00. SA

In this debut novel, Lynn Fleming, an art-history grad student living in Brooklyn, narrates the story of the summer she returns to her home city of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her brother Wylie has disappeared and her mother demands her daughter's help in finding him. Lynn grudgingly boards a plane, professing only distaste for her native town--its dryness and strip malls and lack of culture, the place where her father died of heart failure. She does eventually find Wylie but only half-attempts to convince him to return home and talk with their mother. Wylie's wayward lifestyle and radical activism intrigue her, and she falls into a romance with his comrade Angus. Before she can bow out, Lynn has joined the environmental radicals for meetings and late-night missions to drain suburban pools and destroy sprinkler systems on golf courses.

As the summer goes on, Lynn is confronted by much more than she expected from dull, neon-lit Albuquerque: her strange yet strong attraction to the red-haired, smiling Angus (they drink gin and sleep together in cheap motels); her affinity for Wylie's gang of eco-militants; her mother's new boyfriend; and finally the discovery of two mysterious paintings tucked away under her mother's bed that sparks Lynn's waning interest in her dissertation. At home, she is forced to confront the past she has run away from, and Ohlin writes with a close ear and sensitivity to her characters' volatile dispositions and infatuations. In the end Wylie's most drastic act of dissidence has serious consequences. Yet, Lynn's mother has come to some kind of peace with her son's delinquency, and after Lynn parts ways with Angus, she flies back to New York utterly changed and very aware of it. Avi Kramer, Teaching Intern, The Fessenden School, W. Newton, MA

S--Recommended for senior high school students.

A--Recommended for advanced students and adults. This code will help librarians and teachers working in high schools where there are honors and advanced placements students. This also will help extend KLIATT's usefulness in public libraries.