Michelle Herbert reviews The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel…
The Roanoke Girls is a deeply insidious story told from the perspective of Lane Roanoke, a girl who had grown up with an emotionally abusive mother. When Lane’s mother kills herself Lane is sent to live with her grandparents at Roanoke (the house is named after the family). The book sets us on a journey via two different time frames, the first “Then” gives us the story of Lane’s first summer at Roanoke and how she gets to know the family she didn’t know existed. “Then” should be one of those happy stories of new friends, sun tans and first boyfriends, but there is always something slightly off about this idyll.
The second part of the story is told in the “Now”, not that the parts come one after the other, rather that they twist around each other, giving us more information about events we see in the past and how that ties to Lane’s present-day situation. Both stories tell the tale of how Lane returns to Roanoke, the first as mentioned in the “Then” where she feels like she may finally have a place to call home, in a great monstrosity of a house, which seems to have smashed different kinds of buildings into each other, with her new family comprised of her Grandfather, Yates, who works on the farm to keep himself busy, as the Roanoke’s are rich; her Grandmother, Lillian, who from the start is cold and distant and finally her cousin Allegra, who could almost be Lane’s twin, who, from first appearances seems to live just to enjoy herself.
The second time Lane returns to Roanoke, is when she receives a call from Yates, telling her that Allegra has gone missing and asking her to come home. We don’t know why Lane doesn’t want to return to Roanoke, but she does, as she feels that she owes this to Allegra after leaving her there over ten years ago. What she finds is a house that feels slightly less lived in, as if the light has gone out of it. There is a gaping hole where Allegra should be. Lane gets to see how life has moved on for the people she left behind, as she slowly catches up with her past. It slowly dawns on Lane that she has to be the one who finds out the truth about what happened to Allegra and why she disappeared.
The Roanoke Girls is a grim story that shows how much damage can be done in one family, that is slowly decaying on the inside. Where one man doesn’t even see that he is hurting those he says he loves and no one talks about the family’s dark secret. There is a lot of victim blaming throughout the story, mostly from the victims themselves, not realising that what happened to them wasn’t their fault. It is terrible how one action repeats itself over and over again, until the town, blind to the true events happening at Roanoke, know one thing, a Roanoke girl, either runs away or dies young!
Michelle Herbert
