Nostalgia, we know, is "going home in pain," but Stone's sad, serious novel puts a sharp new nib on the idea of the "nostalgia piece." Melora has lost her sister, Melissa (she is "Mel" and Melora, who might have been Mel, merely "Lora"--which gives you an idea of their relationship, but they are best friends and, in the language the friend of mine who turned me on to this book uses about her own sister, sistertwins and sea-stars). She is going to tell us about it, but not to remember (it's not that kind of nostalgia piece!)--rather to come to grips with the fact that memory fades like tears in rain. Not to memorialize--rather to gingerly circle and expose to air and breathe the miasma of the loss you'll never believe is irrevocable even as you know it is. Not to primally scream--rather to build a careful fence of words around her sister's absence, give her silence the chance to be heard. It's extraordinarily delicate work, especially set as it is in a hosuing development in indelicate Mississagua in the eighties--the factory-worker suburb in what we now know to be the first phase of its (Mulroney-neoliberalism-comin'-on-strong) socioeconomic disintegration; the era of peak child autonomy, where latchkey kids were ever less adults-in-training and moved in a richer and more canny cultural world-of-their-own than ever before, grownups something akin to a fish's bicycle; the punk era, where fourteen-year-olds of a certain nihilistic bent perfected the art of being simultaneously grubby-skinned and dead-eyed omnisneering and at their most heart-throbbingly beautiful (my son's mum was one such, and I knew her then, though she was not my son's mum, and oh, the life that was in her, and in her talent for feeling, obviously including the depth of her sadness). I'm sure Stone chose to set her book in this world because it was one she could bring convincingly to life, but also, I suspect, for all the reasons above. Cf. also, emphatically, the eighties nostalgia piece about a missing kid Passing Strangers, also a fifties nostalgia piece set in the eighties: the loss of a child, and Lora does her level best not to reduce Mel to that but on some level she never stood a chance because the loss of a child is the most shocking memento mori we can imagine--will you be the first child to die, or the last? (Though Mel--like Laura Palmer--never really dies, just vanishes, the end unspoken that, although I don't want to say too much about this, has evoked for a lot of readers the missing women of Vancouver, whose images on posters Lora says look "almost pre-abandoned"). And as Mel's family start to turn and turn again away from the overwhelming awareness of loss and take stock of what's left, as the book shifts terminally into a careful anti-prayer (in that a prayer is a call for succour, and so I guess I mean a prayer when you know help isn't coming and a stock-taking when you know what's left will never be enough) ( )