There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Holy moley, this book was amazing!!!! I was so invested in the mystery of the two missing girls and what happened. It was written so well and kept me very engaged throughout. It was so good that I found my dislike for the main character and the fact that it was an ambiguous ending didn't subtract from my enjoyment. 5 Stars!

A woman sorting through the house of her recently deceased mother stumbles upon the bodies of two girls in her freezer, her foster sisters who everyone assumed had run away years ago. What role did her loving, hippie mother play in their deaths? There isn’t much of a resolution here, which will be disappointing to readers expecting a mystery, but if it is character-driven family drama you are looking for, this is still worthwhile.

3★

Jessica is trying to help her father get over the death of her mother, who had a reputation as a perfect foster mother of many troubled children, from traumatised little ones to rebellious, destructive teens. A woman who filled photo albums and scrapbooks for the kids to show how happy their time with her was. She seldom ‘failed’.

Donna had been an earth mother, the one who grew all her own veggies, made soup for sick neighbours. A bit of a hippy with a “verging-on-manly chuckle that jiggled her belly and shook the grey-blonde curls that fell around her shoulders, riotous. Donna might have dropped stray threads and beads from her clothes while she clomped through mulch and mud, but her touch was always light. Just a fingertip, or the brush of her knuckles across her daughter’s forehead when she was checking for fever.”

Jessica and her father couldn’t stand Donna’s cooking – “slow-cooked pulled tofu” – and sneaked out for hamburgers in cheerful defiance.

We get a lot of do-gooder messages about social justice, crime, domestic violence, bullying. Too many for me.

Jessica’s dad had been an environmental lawyer. Jessica is a social worker (living up to Donna) who struggles with her caseload. Her partner, Trevor, is a sensitive, caring man who struggles on behalf of homeless clients and wants to save the world.

But early in the story, which takes place in Vancouver, Jessica and her father discover the bodies of two young girls in Donna’s freezers in the basement. They were Donna's Chinese-Canadian foster children who had had trouble at school and it was assumed they might have run away again, for good this time.

(Oh yes, multi-cultural issues crop up, too.)

Donna warned her so much about the rapists and murderers around that Jessica grew up terrified walking home from school.

"If Jessica saw a windowless van parked on the street, she ran past it, head down, afraid to even blink because, in the half-second her eyes were closed, a man with a fake beard or a real beard could grab her by the waist and throw her through the rear doors, into a space padded with mattresses and old quilts. Even if she screamed, no one would hear her over the van's starting up. He could stuff a sock in her mouth. He could drug her. He could threaten to kill her parents if she said one word. So she ran, eyes aching with the dry air that pushed at her face."

Now she wonders, if Donna was responsible for the bodies, what kind of do-gooder was she really? Jessica begins to remember some things from when they disappeared when she was only ten.

We go back a generation and meet Donna’s mother, a cold, unfeeling woman from whom Donna was mostly estranged. Then the book moves into her story and we learn Donna’s true back story. Granny had her reasons.

Granny’s story was the best, actually. "I'll never understand why Donna insisted on looking like she was woven out of bran."

I really didn’t care about any of the other characters, Jessica least of all. She wants to lose herself in something, sex, whatever. I understood her – I just didn’t care what happened to her.

Mostly, I was waiting to see what happened, and I was disappointed.

Thanks to NetGalley and ECW Press for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted.