The Dark Place

The day before her 17th birthday, Hylee Williams vanishes from a cookout at her Kansas City home. She emerges nine years in the past in a twisted alternate version of a childhood memory in which her family learned that her older brother had gone missing. When she returns to the present, her parents refuse to acknowledge her sudden disappearance and send her to live with her grandmother in the Missouri suburbs. Hylee uneasily settles into her new school, but she continues to randomly blink out of her contemporary life into that sinister alternate world. With no one to turn to, she struggles to understand what’s happening to her and whether it could be related to her brother’s disappearance. After she vanishes in front of tall, charming, and strangely familiar classmate Eilam Roads, 17, Hylee recruits him into her supernatural investigation. Employing alternating past and present sequences, poetic first-person narration, and moody prose, Lewis (The Undead Truth of Us) builds a tense atmosphere shadowed by secrets unsaid. By deftly exploring the persistent echoes of a traumatic event on one family, Lewis emphasizes the healing power of connection and closure. Hylee and Eilam are Black. Ages 12–up. Agent: Katelyn Detweiler, Jill Grinberg Literary. (Aug.)