Fragile

I was disappointed that the shipment of this book has not arrived yet! I have emailed several times about it, but heard nothing back from you!

This was okay. I was a bit disappointed in it overall.

This new book is the first I've read by Lisa Unger, and I'm now anxious to read more. The action takes place in a small town about 100 miles from New York City. Jones Cooper is a police detective, his wife Maggie is a psychologist, and their 17 year old son, Rick, plays in a band and has a girlfriend, Charlene. Charlene turns up missing, and no one is sure whether she's been abducted or is a runaway. She has problem relationships with both her mother and stepfather, and always talks about running away to New York to enter the music business. It turns out every family in this town has dirty little secrets, one involving another girl who disappeared 20 years before and turned up dead. The action escalates to a point where you feel you can't read fast enough to see what happens. What makes this author's writing good is that every character and every incident are in there for a purpose, to move the story along. There is nothing superfluous that should have been edited out. The plot is tightly meshed from the beginning, yet is not so obvious that you can guess what will happen. If you feel like pulling an all-nighter, I recommend this book.

A fast read because you can't put it down. I was captured from the very beginning by the fullness of the characters. I've not read previous Unger novels but definitely will search them out after this. She has captured the very real fears of every parent, the coldness of technology communication, the depth of the impact on children of emotionally wounded parents, and the emotional baggage one teenage error can produce. Add living in a small town where everyone knows everyone else and their respective histories (or think they do) and you have a marvelous read that compells you to keep reading regardless of the time.

When a young girl (Charlene) goes missing, inhabitants of a small New York town are forced to think back upon another young girl's disappearance many years before. That evenr created a fork in the road of life for many of the characters in "Fragile." The description on the book jacket is a but misleading. It is not so much about a conflict between Maggie and Jones when their son's girlfriend goes missing. The jacket description would lead you to believe that Maggie must now prove their son's innocence. It's more about unraveling old old lies to find truth and, hopefully resolution. As the town takes steps to find Charlene, some of the town's citizens also take steps to come to terms with what happened in the past. Other reviewers have described the plot at great length, and done so very well, so I'll skip ahead to my Top Ten List of things that are great about Lisa Unger's book. 10. Great physical descriptions. You can feel the cold, smell the air, sense the dread that the town feels. 9. Some of the most dysfunctional families you'll ever meet (hopefully). Ever wonder if the sins of the father are visited upon the son? They certainly are in this town. 8. The characters are unique and compelling. No main character is left as a plain manila character. Each has quirks and a past. Jones, the detective and father of Ricky who is briefly considered a suspect, is closed off emotionally. He is the son of a dysfunctional childhood, yet the kid who always tried to "do good" anyway, and once failed spectacularly. There's his wife, Maggie, a therapist, who feels a compelling need to heal everyone and everything. There's Ricky, wannabe rebel, with the tattoo that's starting to show signs of infection and a 4.0 GPA. And there are the old classmates, each with a past and a current path to follow. 7. The complexities of the families and relationships and generations rivals that of a Russian novel. You might want to make a chart when you begin reading, because at times, you'll be seeing/meeting three generations within a town full of families, where the grandmother knows the players from all three generations, the parents know each other from high school, and now their kids know each other on different levels. 6. Small town life. Wow. Hard to imagine for city dwellers. But this is a town where almost everyone has always lived there, and thus they all share a history and a collective, as well as a divergent, memory. They all know each other, and always have. What happened 20 years ago has ripples that spread outward and intersect with events today. Imagine that you went to high school with the mother of your son's rebel girlfriend... and that your mother, who was the school principal, remembers every detention both of you ever endured. Then kick it up about 9 notches, and you have life in this town. 5. An insightful analysis of how one event, one fork in the road, can change a life forever. This, perhaps, is the theme of the boo

The story opens with a Police Officer throwing a bundle into an abandoned well, then shoveling dirt to cover it completely.... The story flashes back to a month earlier. The reader learns how the past has shaped every character and affected their present day relationships. A girl has gone missing in The Hollows, a small town about two hours away from New York, a small town where some secrets and gossip never die. More you may enjoy....VEIL OF NIGHT, by Howard...LAST NIGHT AT CHATEAU MARMOND, by Weisberger...CARRY ME HOME, by Kring....EXPLOSION IN PARIS, by Pirrung...

Sometimes you open a book and it grabs you right from the very first chapter, and doesn't let go till the very end. Of the hundreds of books I have read, there have been a few like that. Books that even after you close them and put them back on the shelf, stay with you for a very long time. Lisa Unger's Fragile is one such book. I could say that Fragile is the story of a young girl's disappearance. That it is about small town secrets, or families cracking apart . I could say that because it is all of those things. This book kept me up nights telling myself "just one more chapter" . It's a suspenseful story set in a small town outside New York City where many residents have lived their whole lives. The kind of of town where almost everyone knows everyone else. One night a young girl leaves home after arguing with her mother, only to never come home that night. What begins from there is a sequence of events that bring back memories of a similar event 20 years earlier and how it affects those involved. Did she run away, as she stated on her Facebook status? Or was she taken by someone out to do her harm. I don't like to give away too much of a story in a review because I don't want to cheat anyone of of the mysteries and answers I had the pleasure of discovering myself. I will tell you Fragile is not the first novel I have read by Lisa Unger, and it certainly will ot be the last.