The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf

The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf
Five Stars
August 2024

Heather Gudenkauf, is a New York Times best-selling author who was born in Wagner, South Dakota, same town I graduated from high school. She currently lives in Iowa and many of her storylines take place in Iowa. This was her debut novel and I am in instant fan.

This is a crisis as two seven year-old girls are not in the beds come morning. Calli and Petra are best friends. Calli stopped speaking at age four for unknown reasons and Petra has become her voice. The heavily wooded area surrounding the girl’s homes becomes the center of focus in the search. This same forest holds memories, contains secrets and provides alibis for many. The families of the missing girls become impatient with the slow moving search and many go on their own hunt creating a complicated web of forest comings and goings and multitude of conflicting explanations as the story unfolds. Assumptions of guilt and finger-pointing are not without merit as the author has written her story with scenarios, each seeming plausible. The entertaining value of the story is the surprise twisty turns, and the red herrings. Can’t wait to read her next. -Kim Luke

Book Blurb-
It happens quietly one August morning. As dawn's shimmering light drenches the humid Iowa air, two families awaken to find their little girls have gone missing in the night.

Seven-year-old Calli Clark is sweet, gentle, a dreamer who suffers from selective mutism brought on by a tragedy that pulled her deep into silence as a toddler. Calli's mother, Antonia, tried to be the best mother she could within the confines of marriage to a mostly absent, often angry husband. Now, though she denies that her husband could be involved in the possible abductions, she fears her decision to stay in her marriage has cost her more than her daughter's voice.

Petra Gregory is Calli's best friend, her soul mate and her voice. But neither Petra nor Calli has been heard from since their disappearance was discovered. Desperate to find his child, Martin Gregory is forced to confront a side of himself he did not know existed beneath his intellectual, professorial demeanor.

Now these families are tied by the question of what happened to their children. And the answer is trapped in the silence of unspoken family secrets.

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