Sycamore (Wheeler Publishing Large Print) - Hardcover

An Amazon Best Book of May 2017: We are given to understand, very early on, that Jess Winters has been dead for a long while. But the circumstances are not clear, even when her body is discovered in the first few chapters, and we are well into the book before mention is made of an investigation into her death. Instead, this quietly affecting novel builds up a picture of an ordinary teen, in an ordinary town, and how her disappearance and the very town itself have become inextricably bound in ways that speak to our ability to navigate love, betrayal, deception, desire, and secrets. Jess is introduced at a low point in her young life: feeling cast aside by her father’s second marriage and newborn daughter, she’s further displaced by a move to a small Arizona town with her mother. Alternating chapters show Jess as the new girl in town prior to her disappearance, and years later, shows those she left behind recollecting the ways both big and small in which Jess had a big effect on the lives around her. The dual timelines are skillfully used to keep the suspense building with regard to solving the mystery of her disappearance but also to gather together the threads of a theme running throughout the novel: how much time we are given, and how we use it, and how even small actions can have effects that ripple across the years. Sycamore is both a mystery and a tragic coming of age story but above all, a bittersweet exploration of the different ways a heart can break and heal. --Vannessa Cronin, The Amazon Book Review