The Vanishing Season

About The Vanishing Season

Maggie Larsen arrives in Door County, Wisconsin reluctantly. Her parents have moved the family from Chicago for reasons she doesn't fully understand, and she expects to spend the year in a beautiful but dead-end place, reading books and marking time until she can leave. Instead, she meets Pauline and Liam—a pair who have been each other's whole world since childhood, now seventeen and holding each other in ways that are starting to need renegotiation. The three of them become inseparable, building something that stretches the old friendship and makes room for something new. Then, at the edges of their world, people start disappearing from the county. The lake takes them.

Published by HarperCollins in 2014, The Vanishing Season is narrated by Maggie and haunted throughout by a presence that is never fully explained—a voice at the margins that is watching the three of them with something that is not exactly warmth. Anderson uses the structural suspense of the disappearances to hold the novel's interior story in tension: the friendship between Maggie, Pauline, and Liam is itself a kind of precariousness, and the danger outside their circle mirrors the danger of loving people as deeply as they love each other.

Door County—the Wisconsin lake peninsula, cold water and summer orchards and a landscape that feels like it's holding something back—is rendered with the same attention to place that distinguished Anderson's Georgia orchard. The setting does real work in the novel: it is beautiful and slightly menacing in equal measure.

Friendship, Loss, and What Summer Takes

The novel's ghost—literal or metaphorical, depending on how the reader chooses to read it—is interested in the three teenagers in a way that is never threatening but is always present. It suggests that the year Maggie spends in Door County will be remembered differently from how it is lived, and that some seasons end in ways that cannot be undone.

Anderson handles the love triangle—if that's what it is—with unusual delicacy. Pauline and Liam's history is not treated as competition but as context, and what grows between Maggie and both of them is given space to be complicated rather than resolved into a clean outcome.

Why The Vanishing Season Has Been Challenged

The Vanishing Season has been challenged in 1 state and 1 district tracked in this catalog. Challenges cite mature content, some language, and the novel's supernatural elements—which are ambiguous by design. A novel that takes its characters' interiority seriously, renders grief and love with specificity, and refuses to explain its uncanny elements as either literally real or purely psychological is doing something harder than most young adult fiction attempts. That difficulty is a reason to keep it available, not to remove it.