29. The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond

When photographer Abby Mason stops on a foggy San Francisco beach to photograph a dead seal pup, she takes her eyes off of her fiancé’s six-year-old daughter, Emma. Within a matter of seconds, Emma disappears into the thick fog. It is a moment that Abby will relive every day over the next year, when she and Jake, her fiancé, try to find Emma. As months go by, and thousands of flyers are distributed and numerous pleas on television go unanswered, Jake becomes convinced his daughter is dead – especially after one of Emma’s shoes is found. Abby refuses to believe that the little girl she has come to love as her own is dead, and instead keeps remembering a couple in a yellow van parked by the beach that morning. Her memories lead her to Costa Rica, and an ultimately shocking conclusion.

This book has generated some strong buzz for summer reading picks and has had strong reviews in publishing journals. While I did not find it totally believable, the book has a strong pacing to it that draws readers in from the first page, and you genuinely want to know if Abby will ever find out what happens that day. While it deals with loss and how parents grieve, it is also a novel of hope and strongly explores the role of memory in our lives. For readers of Jaquelyn Mitchard (especially The Deep End of the Ocean) and Jodi Picoult.