Missing Girls
Buy the Book:Amazon
Bookshop.org
Published by: Puffin Books
Release Date: April 23, 2001
Pages: 192
ISBN13: 978-0141310862
Synopsis
Carrie Schmidt is a missing girl.
It’s the summer of 1967, and the newspapers are full of stories about “missing girls”—girls who run away, looking for freedom and thrills in New York City. Carrie Schmidt feels like she’s missing, too—from her own life. Ever since her mother died four years ago, it’s as if she’s been sleepwalking. Then Carrie meets Mona Brockner, who knows the secret of “lucid dreaming,” being awake inside your dreams. Their friendship is Carrie’s chance to find her mother, wake up—and step into her future.
This book is fiction but so much of it is true. Like Carrie, I envied my best friend’s all-American family while my family was full of immigrants. Like Carrie, I found it odd to have a grandmother and no mother. Like Carrie, I felt the presence of a war I never had to live through. All the war stories in the book are real, told to me by my grandmother and by my uncle, William Stern, who allowed me to interview him once a week for two years. His complete story was later videotaped by Steven Spielberg’s “Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.”
Add on GoodreadsPraise
- Junior Library Guild Book Selection
- Included in The New York Times Parent’s Guide to the Best Books for Children, Edited by Eden Ross Lipson
“Like Metzger’s Barry’s Sister and Ellen’s Case, this novel is intense and complex, and it is as satisfying as finding a misplaced treasure.”
—School Library Journal, ★ Starred Review
“The gap between the ideal and real behavior can be so acute that it bends the mind. Lois Metzger’s rich and moving third novel, Missing Girls, is taken to new heights in the character of Carrie Schmidt. Carrie is a genuine eighth grader: self-effacing, sometimes dishonest, generous with her friends, dramatically moody, irresistibly sympathetic… Metzger builds Missing Girls on the skeleton of dialogue. Her conversations pump the story rich with oxygenated warmth.”
– The New York Times Sunday Book Review
“This uncommon novel from Metzger steps out of the genre of historical fiction to tell a story as significant to contemporary readers as to the inhabitants of the era it evokes.”
— Kirkus
“Metzger’s affecting novel draws readers directly inside the experiences of thirteen-year-old Carrie Schmidt… Most exceptional, however, is the full realization of Carrie’s emotional life, from her initial sleepwalking haze to the emerging brilliant colors and sense of contentment in both her waking and dreaming life.”
— The Horn Book
“Dreams, memories, and haunting tales of the past surge through the pages of this story and bring the reader deep into Carrie Schmidt’s awakening heart. In strong, fresh language, Lois Metzger has written a unique story, remarkable for its insights and original in its characterizations of teenage girls, who are surprising and yet completely recognizable. We know these girls, we know their fears, angers, and desires, and under Lois Metzger’s sure hand we want to know more.”
— Norma Fox Mazer
Excerpt