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Reviewed by Divine Zape for Readers' Favorite
The Quiet Unraveling of Eve Ellaway by Melanie Hooyenga is an intriguing YA novel that explores the inner conflict of Eve Ellaway, a high school senior living a double life. Eve is burdened by the secret of her twin sister Gen’s disappearance as a baby. This trauma has left her mother psychologically fragile and living in a carefully constructed reality. With her father's complicity, Eve maintains the illusion that Gen is still a part of their lives, even creating a separate persona for herself to interact with her mother as Gen. The core conflict arises from Eve's desperate attempt to keep this elaborate charade intact as she approaches graduation and the prospect of leaving home for college, a move that threatens to shatter her mother's world and expose their secret to outsiders. How can she help her mother while embracing the freedom of college life?
Melanie Hooyenga’s novel has strong psychological underpinnings, and I have not read a book in which trauma and family secrets are explored from this unique angle. The setting of a sleepy lakeside town in Michigan, with its insular community and proximity to Lake Michigan, is brilliantly developed. The characters are richly drawn, especially Eve, whose internal monologue reveals a sharp wit, deep-seated anger, and a desperate yearning for authenticity. Her relationships with her emotionally distant father, her mother trapped in a delusion, her supportive but unaware friend Ember, and her on-again-off-again boyfriend Cal highlight the various facets of her existence. The introduction of Wes Sherman, a new neighbor and past acquaintance, and Mariela, a fellow student journalist, further complicates Eve's life and challenges her tightly controlled narrative. The Quiet Unraveling of Eve Ellaway is a page-turner.
