[Blog Tour] The Mystery of Hollow Places by Rebecca Podos

ABOUT

Title: The Mystery of Hollow Places
Author: Rebecca Podos
Publisher: Balzer & Bray
Release Date: January 26th 2016
Goodreads Page
Synopsis:

All Imogene Scott knows of her mother is the bedtime story her father told her as a child. It's the story of how her parents met: he, a forensic pathologist, she, a mysterious woman who came to identify a body. A woman who left Imogene and her father when she was a baby, a woman who was always possessed by a powerful loneliness, a woman who many referred to as troubled waters.

When Imogene is seventeen, her father, now a famous author of medical mysteries, strikes out in the middle of the night and doesn't come back. Neither Imogene's stepmother nor the police know where he could've gone, but Imogene is convinced he's looking for her mother. She decides to put to use the skills she's gleaned from a lifetime of her father's books to track down a woman she's never known, in order to find him and, perhaps, the answer to the question she's carried with her for her entire life.

Rebecca Podos' debut is a powerful, affecting story of the pieces of ourselves that remain mysteries even to us - the desperate search through empty spaces for something to hold on to.

You should know that I'm a huge fan of mysteries and of crime procedurals. With those stories, there's always a sort of fantastical element - high speed car chases, explosions, super smart people doing things nobody else can seem to accomplish. The mystery in this novel is real and grounded. Imogene Scott is not a genius, nor does she have any sort of special resources to help her find her father. All she has is her conviction that her father is looking for her mother, her best friend, and the skills she's acquired from reading her father's mystery novels all her life.

I really quite enjoyed this novel where it's read in Imogene's perspective. We get to follow her journey of finding her birth mother and hopefully, in turn, finding her father. She's always been sort of closed off from other people. Her only real friend is Jessa and only because they've been around each other since they were little. She's also a quarter Cantonese which is cool (because I'm Cantonese)!

Jessa is a great best friend and a great partner in crime to Imogene. While they are best friends, Imogene has always been sort of distant and it's this mystery that Jessa is helping her solve that brings them closer together. I love that she's a willing participant and helped Imogene with her plans, despite not necessarily believing Imogene.

THE MYSTERY OF HOLLOW PLACES is a very real mystery of Imogene looking for her father, but it's also a story of Imogene's relationship with people evolving for the better as well. Her relationship with her stepmother, her father, her best friend and all the people in her life change as she goes on this journey to search for the truth of her mother and to find her father and bring him home. This novel is great for people who are looking for a mystery that doesn't involve saving the world or global espionage, but instead just a very normal girl looking for the truth and her father.

* I received an e-ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review and to participate in this blog tour. *

EXCERPT

The Mystery Of Hollow Places | Books | Epic Reads

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Podos' debut YA novel, THE MYSTERY OF HOLLOW PLACES, is forthcoming from Balzer + Bray (HarperCollins) on 1/26/16. A graduate of the Writing, Literature and Publishing program at Emerson College where she won the M.F.A. Award for Best Thesis, her fiction has been published in Glimmer Train, Glyph, CAJE, Paper Darts, Bellows American Review, and Smokelong Quarterly. Past Awards include the Helman Award for Short Fiction, the David Dornstein Memorial Creative Writing Prize for Young Adult Writers, and the Hillerman-McGarrity Scholarship for Creative Writing. She works as a YA and MG agent at the Rees Literary Agency in Boston.

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