Review: Finding Frances by Kelly Vincent

A young woman transcends a tragic loss to uncover the truth about her own life in Finding Frances by Kelly Vincent, a gripping YA thriller from a masterful pen.

Stepping out of her sheltered life for the first time, Retta is nervous and eager for a normal high school experience, real friends, and the chance to literally run free on the cross-country team. Having lost her father and all four of her grandparents in a mysterious accident years earlier, Retta struggles under the weight of grief and isolation, but she begins to blossom in this new social soil.

However, unsatisfied curiosity, little white lies from her mother, and long-unanswered questions make Retta suspect that the reality of her familial tragedy is anything but open and shut. After a harmless night of teenage rebellion, she returns home to find a gruesome scene, a shocking validation of her mother’s perennial paranoia and inexplicable worry.

Swept up into a secretive network of matriarchal protectors, Retta learns the truth about her family history and the events that led her mother to flee into hiding. Following in those same dark footsteps, Retta finds herself with a family she doesn’t know in a place that is frighteningly far from her shattered home. Navigating the unpredictable tides of PTSD and attempting to reclaim a “normal life,” she attempts to overcome her fears and move forward, but a shadowy specter from the past refuses to let her go.

Vincent’s subtle stretches of exposition slow-boil readers into the gripping plot, while the dialogue-heavy scenes keep the pace high and engaging. The writing tends to be more declarative than descriptive, relying on the drama of the storytelling and emotional nuance, rather than immersing readers in vividly detailed scenes, but this keeps the pace high without sacrificing storytelling depth. The character development is thorough and believable, as are the relationships between Retta, Jack, Nana, and Aunt Sam.

The thematic focus is where the novel comes truly alive, solidly focusing on the impacts of familial trauma and the processing of grief, as well as broader ideas of identity, independence, trust, empathy, forgiveness, and the inexcusable cracks of the criminal justice system. In lesser hands, the narrative could seem more like a sounding board for hot-button topics, but these heady issues are handled with sensitivity, and deftly woven into the plot, without making the story feel overly issue-driven.

While the sparse description does work for pacing, some of the prose feels undeveloped in its level of detail, with descriptive language that lacks energy – “fine,” “good,” “okay.” The main character may be a teenage girl, but capturing her indifferent angst in dialogue and narration could be done without clipped prose. There are also some disconnects between the events of the plot and the emotional range of the main character – for example, after finding a family member in a pool of blood, Retta’s reaction feels detached and inauthentic, even if one could attribute her behavior to shock or the panic of being pursued by the killer. While more processing of the trauma occurs later in the novel, the emotional toll of that instigating event feels muted, as is the case with other emotional moments.

The arc of the story is excellent, however, with an inspiring amount of growth in the main character, along with powerful messages of female empowerment and resilience that will appeal to a broad swath of contemporary readers, beyond YA thrillers.