The World Before Us by Aislinn
Hunter
Today Jane is thirty-five and
working as an archivist at a private museum created over a hundred years ago
and about to shut its doors forever. She
becomes obsessed with old records after finding an entry about a girl who
disappeared on the lands adjacent to an old asylum’s grounds. Only one entry is made about N--- going
missing. Nothing else is ever written
and Jane is determined to solve the mystery because she is still trying to
understand an event from twenty years ago.
Jane, fifteen years old, was to watch over Lily, aged five, as her
father searched out plants from gardens created a hundred years ago. Lily was running along the path seeking out
numbered markers and rounded a curve in the path to find the next in the
series.When Jane made the turn shortly after the little girl was gone, never to
be seen again. N--- disappeared from the
same location, could the two be related somehow?
The author does a really interesting
thing with the narrative. In the beginning
of the book “we” is talking about their feelings and experiences and over the
course of the next few sections it becomes clear that “we” is an entity made up
of a number of ghosts all trying to piece together who they were in life. As
the book goes on “we” becomes identifiable individuals. It’s a cool concept and
the author does it really well. However,
I had a problem with the ending. Maybe I
missed something huge, but I don’t think I did.
One of the storylines is never resolved and it drove me nuts. The whole point of Jane’s research into the
past is to try to piece together how two disappearances may be related yet we
never have a resolution for one of them.
I am a huge fan of the open ending, but this was a little too wide open
for me.
This book is released on March 31,
2015.
