Rating: 
Summary: HEART BREAKING AND TRAGIC--A WONDERFUL READ
Review: This book broke my heart! Tragic people whose lifes intertwine. I could not put this book down. It haunts me still.
Rating:
Summary: HEART BREAKING AND TRAGIC--A WONDERFUL READ
Review: This book broke my heart! Tragic people whose lifes intertwine. I could not put this book down. It haunts me still.
Rating: 
Summary: an unbelivable, boring book with a great ending
Review: This book grabs you and when you finish reading it, you never see the world in the same way. Their life is pathetic and heart wrenching. All the characters are depressing and unmotivated. All the time you are reading, you know at some point the fallacy has to end. The ending will have you thinking, and thinking. Swept up in the circumstances of their lives, they all seem victims unable to control anything. I felt sorry for Canny, the child who is kidnapped and sorry by the way things turned out for Wallace.
Rating: 
Summary: A Compassionate Study of Compulsion
Review: This book was a gift. I picked it up and put it down many times, thinking I could not handle the subject matter. Finally, I was so hungry for good writing that I had no choice. Good writing was only one of my rewards. A journey with Aubrey Wallace, through his accidental and tragically maniuplated misadventures, was an enlightening and humbling experience. The truth will never be known, but the author spins a compelling and enchanting story about a simple-minded accomplice and his role in a compulsive and ill-conceived kidnapping. In the end you care deeply about Aubrey and the girl and find a seed of hope for human dignity and kindness. There are many treasures to be found in this tale.
Rating:
Summary: Searing, Gripping and Original
Review: This is one of the greatest books I have ever read and I am sure that the only reason it did not win both the Penn Faulkner and National Book Awards (It was nominated for both) is because it was the first novel Morris ever wrote. This book grabs you and plunges you into a world that when you emerge from it, you may never see the world you are in quite the same. WOW!
Rating:
Summary: Artful but depressing
Review: Vanished is an extremely compelling tale; I finished it in less than a day. But be aware, gentle reader: this is a book that HURTS. I loved Mary McGarry Morris's Songs in Ordinary Time and A Dangerous Woman, and I liked Fiona Range, but I wasn't prepared for the intensity of Vanished. A real story about love weaves through this tale of an abused teenager, a mentally challenged man, and a kidnapped child who are bound together by happenstance and careening toward disaster. However, like Of Mice and Men, it is not for the faint of heart. Without a doubt, Vanished is artfully crafted. But it seemed to me to dish out cruelty at the speed of light, and I was left feeling pretty hollow at the end.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Unknown Novelist Strikes Gold
Review: Vanished is Mary McGarry Morris' masterwork, a complex and entrancing story of a man caught outside the life of his community who is suddenly torn from his hometown by forces he can't fully comprehend. Oddly, most of what he doesn't comprehend is personified by the girl who "kidnapped" him -- a wily, scheming, insecure girl who runs because she has to.
Morris, relatively unknown before Oprah picked up on her most recent best-seller, "Songs in Ordinary Time," is an author who began writing late in life. Her long experience in a world beyond the bounds of rarified "literary" fiction shows in her compassion for her main characters.
In Vanished, her insight is most marked when she refuses to give definite reasons for things. Instead, she allows the emotional weight of an event to compound until its consequences become inevitable. In this book, so many things disappear -- but they always leave traces. Traces of hope, and of desire.
In this book, an arbitrary escape turns into a four year odyssey. But it's not the typical trip out of contemporary fiction, full of drugs, sex, and lost weekends. Instead it's a simple journey, replete with attempts at security and love, emptied of cynicism or sardonic humor.
Thus, the terrific ending comes as a shock, and yet feels right after all. How else could such an extraordinary journey conclude but with the unexpected?
Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Prize, this book beats Morris' "Oprah"-Recommended "Songs in Ordinary Time," hands-down
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