In 1994, Zahara watched her sixteen-year-old fraternal twin sister voluntarily get into a strange car mouthing the word “Goodbye.”  Unable to countenance any good reason for the event, Zahara took the event as a kidnapping. But within minutes of her neighbor giving her the license plate written on a scrap of paper and talking to the police, something changed.  The neighbor disappeared and the police had no record of her call.  And then it got worse.  When she got home and tearfully told her mother that her sister was kidnapped, her mother was bewildered as she, Zahara, was an only child.  No one but Zahara remembered Annica. After that, Zahara snapped.  She spent all her time roaming the streets looking for her sister until her mother had her committed. She finally gave up her assertions to regain her freedom. 

Annica had always been a sickly child having inherited the sickle cell gene and the disease.  The family had always revolved around Annica’s hospital stays and restricted life.  Zahara had always dreamed of being a ballerina but eventually had to stop classes the family couldn’t afford. Their father died when the girls were young and their mother did all she could to keep them together and fed.

After Annica disappeared, Zahara’s new reality was a mother with a successful career, plenty of money in the bank, food on the table and most wondrous: Zahara was on her way to being a professional dancer.  But there was no Annica in her life.

Four years later, Zahara found the scrap of paper with the license plate number; proving, at least to herself, that she wasn’t crazy.  And now that she was an adult, the threat of institutions was lessened.  She decided to hire an investigator. As the investigation started to yield results, Zahara abandoned her position as a lead dancer in a ballet company; a position she’d worked her entire life to get which was exceedingly rare for a black woman.  But the mere possibility of finding Annica overshadowed everything.

What she discovered was beyond imagination.

The narrative is interspersed with online discussion threads that Annica had before she disappeared which give tantalizing hints to her intention; and transcriptions of audio tapes that their father made for the girls before he passed.  The audio tapes recount an event in Vietnam that changed their father and his entire squad forever.  And the girls are the inheritors.

The soldiers in Vietnam had a mystical encounter with a pair of otherworldly twins who gave gifts in exchange for being fed.  But they didn’t exist on food; they needed other sustenance.  And they often returned years later requesting to be fed again.  The men (and one female journalist) came home and tried to learn how to control their new abilities. These abilities came with a huge price; each time they were used, energy had to be dispersed somewhere or it would kill the wielder, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly.

As Zahara and her investigator, Theo, find and interview some of these people, the truth becomes staggeringly unbelievable.  And Zahara struggles to understand if any of it could explain Annica’s disappearance and the wholesale forgetting that everyone who knew her experienced.  And, of course, why Zahara didn’t forget.

The story gets really interesting when the author includes the Y2K scare. For our younger readers, the Y2K scare was a very real threat to us back in 1999.  The idea was that all our computer coding used a two-digit year; which would potentially cause computer programs to fail when the year turned over to 00.  It was thought that anything that used a computer would fail: water pumping plants, cash registers, electronics, electrical systems, etc.  There was a run on supplies that would look familiar to those who knew the COVID years.

In this novel, the author uses the upcoming threat to develop the ‘bad guy’ in the plot as someone who wanted to exacerbate the event to drive the entire world into a more primitive state.  That old “the old days were the best” and “we’d be better off as noble savages” trope.  This bad guy was one of Zahara’s father’s squad who had assembled his squadmates’ children into his own little army – an enhanced, powerful army that was making sure the Y2K bug not only worked, but worked more powerfully than anyone anticipated.  And Zahara might be the only one to stop them; the only problem was that her sister was leading the effort.

This was actually a pretty good story; not terribly engrossing, but interesting nonetheless. The most interesting plot point was the question of whether the girls had inherited anything from their father.  The plot was complex enough, involving the event in Vietnam, the effect on the squad over the years and the result of them passing on abilities to their children a generation later.  It was a very insular plot in that few people outside of those affected had a part in the story.  Adding in the Y2K scare was an easy conflict.  Having lived through the scaremongering the press engaged in back in 1999 and seeing no impact to my own life, I didn’t feel much tension in the story.  And I didn’t completely buy-in to the idea that the young people with fantastic powers were going to be able to drive the entire world back to the ‘dark ages.’  They couldn’t erase knowledge as easily as they destroyed technology.  But it was entertaining.   ~~  Catherine Book