Departure Time Truus Matti, translated from the Dutch by Nancy Forest-FlierThere is the girl who remembers nothing and finds herself in the abandoned hotel with the Fox and the Rat and the mysterious piano music.
Then there is the girl who has moved and carries the guilt of the letter she wrote to her father last year-- a letter of anger that ended up being the last one he would receive before he dies in a swimming accident.
The book alternates between the two stories and it's not overly difficult to figure out how they are related, although it doesn't fully come together until the end.
I wasn't a huge fan of the story with the girl in the hotel. It drags. There's a lot of mystery as to what's going on, but not a lot of suspense, and I ended up not really caring. It also had talking animals, which aren't really my thing, except that they didn't really do animal things and could have been humans so it didn't bother me as much as it could have.
I did, however, enjoy the story of the girl dealing with her father's death. The short chapters cover her life before he died and what's going on now, a year later, plus some of the in-between. Due to their brevity (and present tense voice) they're almost like snapshots of life. They move quickly and her anger and grief and remorse are palpable.
It was this second story that kept me slogging through the first story. As much as I ended up liking the book, the unevenness was hard to get through.
Book Provided by... my local library
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