Fighting the Fog

Michelle Richmond's The Year of Fog is a real page-turner, but not in the typical murder-suspense-whodunnit sense. It is so achingly real and heartbreaking that you must keep turning pages to see what happens next. During a morning walk on a foggy beach, a child disappears. Emma vanishes into the fog. Abby spends the next year searching through the fog--the literal fog that shrouds San Francisco, the analogous fog that shrouds her memory of that day, and the fog of sorrow that causes everyone except Abby to give up the search. The book takes us through the painful year of Abby's search. In flashbacks to her past, we are shown the full range of Abby's self and come to understand and emphathize with her. She is a professional photographer who is trained to view things analytically, so she returns again and again to her last views of Emma, searching for a clue that will lead to the lost girl. You'll have to read the book to discover whether Abby's persistence pays off.