Hannahwhere

In a suburb on Boston's North Shore, a catatonic little girl is found behind a dumpster. She is a mystery. As Social Worker Debbie Gillan pieces together the puzzle of the child's identity, she discovers the child had disappeared two years earlier along with a twin sister. She also discovers HANNAHWHERE, an alternate world that is both a haven and a prison.... Life-altering trauma becomes the key to unraveling the truth about the children, about Hannahwhere...and about Debbie herself. Truths that could either save them or destroy them all. "John McIlveen gets it. He gets that while scars heal, they're scars forever, and sometimes, if the damage is deep enough, they always hurt. McIlveen's debut novel is a profoundly sensitive portrait of how traumatized children often need to exert control over some aspects of their own lives in order to cope with uncertainty and how bad life can get. But he understands that finding that measure of control doesn't necessarily fix anything in the long term. Coping is not the same as thriving. And coping mechanisms extended into adulthood can leave self-sufficient, seemingly well-adjusted adults feeling as scared and vulnerable as they have always been. One can draw clear lines from Hannahwhere to Richard Matheson, Andrew Vachss, and Charles de Lint. But McIlveen has his own voice and style. It's not a crime novel, although there's crime at the heart of it. It is not a purely sentimental offering either, though it has a ton of heart. While working in the neighborhood of "urban fantasy" he dispenses with magic and faerie and treats the subject matter with a sense of realism merely draped in fantasy. And he does all this wonderfully, without feeling like any of it is getting short shrift. This is the real deal; a tremendously satisfying and well-realized first novel. John McIlveen gets it." Bracken MacLeod, author of Closing Costs and Stranded