Book Feature: NOW YOU SEE HER

Following two devastating losses — of her daughter and her husband, one to a canoe accident and the other to divorce — fifty-year-old Marcy Taggart struggles to make sense of her life. She takes a trip to Ireland, which was meant to be a second honeymoon, celebrating the 25th anniversary of her marriage. Instead, she finds herself alone in a place that seems as rainy and historically conflicted as she is.

Marcy’s mother had suffered from manic depression and killed herself when Marcy was still a teenager. While she was terrified that mental illness would also affect her eventually, the gene seems to have skipped a generation, and instead her daughter Devon was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. And tragically, it appears that Devon, at the age of 21, also took her life as a result of her illness, when her canoe was found overturned near the family cottage in the icy waters of Georgian Bay. The incident was presumed a suicide, but while Devon had left behind a note, her body was never recovered.

It is while Marcy is nursing her grief in a pub in Cork that she is certain she sees Devon, passing outside on the sidewalk before disappearing in the crowd. Could her daughter actually be alive? Had it been Devon’s intention not to take her own life — but to start a new life? “Inside a voice was screaming, ‘You aren’t dead, are you, Devon? You’re here. I know you are. And whatever it takes, however long it takes, I’m going to find you.'”

Adding to this astonishing development, Marcy also finds herself the focus of the romantic attentions of two men, one a fellow tourist from Chicago, and the other a handsome, younger local bartender. But what are their intentions, really, and can they be trusted? After the last several years of a lonely and mostly sexless marriage, why is she suddenly so attractive to men?

In Marcy’s increasingly frantic search for her daughter, her erratic actions and unlikely liaisons lead the reader to wonder if we are merely watching the actions of a grief-stricken parent or if mental illness has affected Marcy after all.

Joy Fielding’s suspenseful, page-turning novel explores loss, mental illness, mid-life crisis, and most of all, the heartrending and unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters. As with her other books (this is her 23rd novel) Now You See Her continues to build on its tension and unexpected twists until the dramatic conclusion, which finds Marcy, quite literally, at the edge of a cliff.

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