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    The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone
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    The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone
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    The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

    Written by Felicity McLean

    Narrated by Eloise Oxer

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    Part mystery, part coming of age story, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone is set in a distant suburb on the encroaching bushland, over the long hot summer of 1992. It's the summer of the school's Showstopper concert. The summer Tikka never forgot. The summer the Van Apfel sisters disappeared. Blackly comic, sharply observed and wonderfully endearing.

    'We lost all three girls that summer. Let them slip away like the words of some half-remembered song and when one came back, she wasn't the one we were trying to recall to begin with.'

    Tikka Molloy was eleven and one-sixth years old during the long hot summer of 1992 - the summer the Van Apfel sisters disappeared. Hannah, beautiful Cordelia and Ruth vanished during the night of the school's Showstopper concert at the amphitheatre by the river, surrounded by encroaching bushland.

    Now, years later, Tikka has returned home to try and make sense of the summer that shaped her, and the girls that she never forgot.

    Blackly comic, sharply observed and wonderfully endearing, this is Picnic at Hanging Rock for a new generation, a haunting coming-of-age story with a shimmering, unexplained mystery at its heart.

    'The debut of a striking new voice in Australian fiction.' Adelaide Advertiser

    'How do you escape your childhood, emotionally, actually? This compelling mystery by Felicity McLean has a rare depth of psychological and emotional truth. It will engage your heart.' Delia Ephron

    'Sharp, mysteriously moving and highly entertaining' Robert Drewe

    'An exceptional piece of storytelling' Australian Book Review

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateApr 1, 2019
    ISBN9781460790335
    Unavailable
    The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone
    Author

    Felicity McLean

    Felicity McLean's debut novel, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone, has been published in more than half a dozen countries. It was a Barnes & Noble 'Discover Great New Writers' pick in the US, and was shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards, and longlisted for the UK's Dagger Awards, and the Davitt. Her book, Body Lengths, co-written with Olympian Leisel Jones, was Apple Books 'Best Biography of 2015' and won the 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards 'Reader's Choice' for Small Publisher Adult Book of the Year.

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    Reviews for The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

    4/5

    57 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Loved the Australian 80’s references scattered throughout the book. Enjoyed the characters and their stories.
    • 4/5
      A member of my pandemic online book club chose this book for our next read. I had never heard of it or its author. It is probably not surprising that I had not heard of Felicity McLean as she lives in Australia and this is her first novel although her author bio says she has ghostwritten six books. When you boil this book down to its essentials there isn't much of a story but McLean has added to it by making it an exploration of a girl's coming of age.There were three Van Apfel girls--Ruth the youngest, Cordelia in the middle and Hannah the eldest. In 1992 the three of them disappeared into the night and two of them were never seen again. Ruth's body was found lodged in some stones on the bank of the river that flowed near their house. Tikka Mallow was eleven (or as she liked to say eleven and one-sixth years old) when they disappeared. Her sister, Laura, was the same age and best friends with Hannah but Tikka was never really friends with Cordelia who was a little older and far more mature. 1992 was also the year that Lindy Chamberlain, the woman who had been imprisoned in the disappearance of her daughter in the outback but who claimed dingos took the baby, was exonerated. Everyone in Australia was focused on the news about Lindy. Tikka decided to make the story the focus of her skit for their school's Talent Night.That night was the night the Van Apfel girls disappeared. Tikka and Laura knew they were planning on slipping away then and Tikka thought her play would provide a distraction. The Van Apfel parents were part of an evangelical church and were very strict. In fact, Mr. Van Apfel was physically abusive to all the girls but Cordelia was the one who provoked him the most. Although the girls had planned to leave on that night there was something strange about their disappearance. Laura had money to give them but they never connected with her to get it. And they never got in touch with Laura or Tikka after their disappearance. Years later when Tikka is working as a lab technician in Baltimore she still thinks she sees Cordelia but it is always a case of mistaken identity. When she returns to Australia to spend some time with Laura who has just been diagnosed with cancer the details of the case come flooding back to her. What did really happen to the Van Apfel girls?I'm not sure this book worked as either a mystery or a coming of age story. At the end we are no closer to knowing what happened to the Van Apfel girls and we don't learn much about Tikka after that fateful summer until she is an adult. I think it missed the mark on both shots.
    • 5/5
      Twenty years on, Tikka Molloy has always been haunted by the disappearance of the Van Apfel sisters. Were there things that she and her older sister should have told the investigating police at the time?There is a strong Australian setting to this novel - not just the commentary in the backgroundof the Lindy Chamberlain case, but the heat, the bushland, and the flavour of the description. I thought there was also a touch of Scout (To Kill a Mockingbird), of things observed but not necessarily understood. And the story leaves us with more questions, the opportunity to write our own ending, to come to our own conclusions.An excellent read.
    • 3/5
      Why, when replicating an overused plot, would you reference similar books in your blurb? Not only is this story similar to The Virgin Suicides and Picnic at Hanging Rock - and The Trouble With Goats and Sheep and Volcano Street and countless others - but it offers nothing new and isn't even very well written. I wasn't captivated by the narrator 'Tikka' (and never learning her real name really bugged me), either as a precocious/obnoxious eleven year old or twenty years later, and yes, the 'long hot summer' nostalgia is very evocative, but again, other books have been there and done that better (The Chalk Man).Why the Van Apfel girls disappeared is clear enough, but why the whole neighbourhood kept what they knew from the police so the vicious father evaded any responsibility is beyond me. And what the Lindy Chamberlain case has to do with anything is also a puzzle. The dialogue is overblown, and even stretching the 'mystery' out until the last pages - 'We didn't tell anyone and we should have!' - doesn't stop the bulk of the story from turning into a series of childhood anecdotes weakly stitched together with a dark thread of child abuse.Readable but meh.
    • 3/5
      This was well written - I particularly enjoyed the precocious young Tikka - and I liked how it alternated between adult present day Tikka and Laura and the younger teen years when the Van Apfel girls disappeared. However, there were too many unanswered questions and story threads that were never explored or resolved. I won a copy of this book from Goodreads.
    • 4/5
      It’s been twenty years that Tikka Molloy fled her Australian home. Now that her sister is seriously ill, she returns not only to her family but also to a secret that the girls have kept for two decades. They have always been friends with the three van Apfel girls who just lived across the street, Cordelia, Hannah and Ruth were their closest friends that they confided in. And so did the Molloy girls. This is why they shared their plan of running away. But something went totally wrong. Tikka’s older sister Lauren was to go with them, but somehow they miss each other at their agreed meeting point and a few days after they ran away, only 8-year-old Ruth turned up again. Dead. Returning home brings back all the memories of the weeks before the van Apfel girls’ disappearance.Felicity McLean’s novel mixes different topics and genres. On the one hand, it is a coming-of-age novel, the girls all have to face the fact that adults can be evil and that sometimes are not to be trusted. On the other hand, it is also a mystery novel, you don’t know what really happened, if the girls might still be alive. And it is a study in how to live with the knowledge that behaving in a different way in a certain situation might have made a big difference.As other reviewers have pointed out before, yes, while reading you have the impression of having read it before. There are certain parallels to other novels such as “The Suicide Sisters” and much of the plot has been treated in similar ways before. Yet, I liked to read it anyway especially because McLean manages to convincingly get the tone of eleven-year-old Tikka who is at times naive but always good-hearted and well-meaning. A perfect beach read that I thoroughly enjoyed.
    • 4/5
      ‘Don’t you know? The Van Apfel girls are gone.’In the summer of 1992, sisters Hannah, Cordelia, and Laura Van Apfel vanished from an outdoor school concert. Twenty years later, Tikka Molloy still imagines she might see the Van Apfel girls again, and when she returns to her family home to support her ill sister, she cannot help but reexamine the events of that fateful summer. “We lost all three girls that summer. Let them slip away like the words of some half-remembered song,...”Perhaps best described as suburban gothic, part enigmatic mystery, part haunting coming of age tale, The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is told largely from the perspective of Tikka at age 11. Tik is a charming narrator, and McLean has struck just the right balance between precociousness and naivety. With both the wisdom and innocence of childhood, she relates her experiences of the summer, from scorching days poolside, to news reports of Lindy Chamberlain’s vindication, to the secrets she and her sister, Laura, kept for their friends, Hannah, Cordelia, and Ruth Van Apfel.“For so long we’d been haunted by those girls. Since the moment they first disappeared. We were the ones left behind, Laura and I. Defined by what was long gone. And if not that, then what? Who should we be?”With adult hindsight, Tikka has some regrets about that summer. It’s a large part of the reason she can’t let go, and McLean thoughtfully explores the way in which Tikka was, and continues to be, affected by the missing Van Apfel girls. It’s Cordelia, the beautiful, enigmatic middle sister that looms largest in Tikka’s mind, the target of her father’s zealotry, the subject of childish innuendo, admired and envied in almost equal measure, despite being just thirteen the year she vanished. McLean’s portrayal of the Van Apfel girls is limited, largely filtered through Tik’s unsophisticated viewpoint, but still compelling.“We ran elaborate underwater handstand competitions In the Van Apfel pool that day. First round, second round, best of the best. Our skinny legs stabbing at the sky like the bows of some demented orchestra.”I have to admit a part of the appeal of this story is the nostalgia it evokes for me. Tik’s experience of childhood is not that much different than my own- handstand competitions in the pool, thongs sticking to melting bitumen roads, Sunnyboy’s dug out of the freezer, scaring ourselves half to death with seances during sleepovers. I even had pet mice, and a river ran through the bush at the bottom of my street.“There was before and there was ever after.”It’s only fair that prospective readers know that the fate of the Van Apfel girls remains largely unresolved, for me, it wasn’t really an issue. An atmospheric and poignant novel, I thought The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone was an engaging and mesmeric debut from Felicity McLean.