We Don't Talk About Carol, Kristen L. Berry's debut novel, is a story of family, fertility, and personal trauma brilliantly layered over a thrilling investigation into six unsolved disappearances. Ex-reporter Sydney Singleton, who is in the process of undergoing fertility treatments, already has enough to worry about. Then she discovers the existence of her Aunt Carol, who disappeared in the 1960s along with five more Black girls from her neighborhood, and becomes fixated on their disappearances.
But as she investigates, she worries that her fixation is all too similar to her out-of-control obsession with a kidnapping case that led to an eight-day stay in the psychiatric department of a San Francisco hospital--events that ultimately caused her to leave journalism.
Berry pulls these two intertwined narrative threads taut, making for a compulsive read. Sydney is drawn to figure out what happened to her aunt and the other girls, particularly since cases of missing people of color often receive less media coverage and are "less likely to be solved than cases of missing white folks." But she's afraid that the stress may be impacting her attempt to conceive, and she's torn by her husband's fears that she might be headed for another breakdown. Conflicts within her own family and her personal trauma both become entangled with these fears.
There's so much to admire about this novel: a page-turning plot, multifaceted characters, and explorations of the issue that cases of missing persons of color are less likely to be solved, all seen through a compelling and intensely intimate lens. --Carol Caley, writer