At age eleven, Nora and Charlotte are the best of friends—until their teenager babysitter, Rose, disappears under mysterious circumstances. They decide to “investigate,” using paranormal theories and techniques they glean from a hand-me-down collection of Time-Life books. But their search goes nowhere, and leaves both girls distraught and angry with each other.
In her late twenties, Nora is drawn back her old neighborhood, and to Charlotte, when Rose’s bones are found. She was probably murdered, and Charlotte is adamant that they solve the crime. Nora—who was the last known person to see Rose alive—is forced to reconsider her memory of the events surrounding the disappearance, and her own troubled adolescence following those fateful days. And she’s not sure if she’s ready to face the secrets that begin to surface.
Told in alternating narratives from the past and present, this is a mystery about broken friendship and the unease of revisiting adolescent memory.
I don’t think I have ever read a book like this.
It was a thing of beauty.
Psychologically stimulating and arousing waves of nostalgia to float around me like fireflies in a dark and damp night, In Search of Rose Notes is a magical and precious book.
The characters- all the characters, were fully fleshed out and seemed so real and so human, I physically ached for them when the book got over.
There was the mystery of the missing babysitter and who killed her and woven with that were the flashbacks to Nora and Charlotte’s childhood and their paranormal investigations.
There was a dreamy, dark and dreary air throughout the book.
It doesn’t even feel like a book I read but more like a book I lived.
Emily Arsenault is a literary treasure and this book is a literary gem.
Last words:
Last words:
Memories, secrets and a pernicious past collide together in this emotionally exhausting book to deliver an epiphany of sorts.
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