MISSING SAM, urgently tale urgent told

MISSING SAM
THRITY UMRIGAR
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From bestselling author Thrity Umrigar, a thrilling and haunting story of an Indian-American woman who becomes the prime suspect when her wife goes missing.

When Aliya and Samantha have a fight one night, Samantha goes for a run early the next morning—and doesn’t come back.

Aliya reports her wife Samantha as missing, but as a gay and Muslim daughter of immigrants, she’s immediately suspected by her neighbors in Samantha's disappearance. Scared and furious and feeling isolated as everyone around her doubts her innocence, Aliya makes one wrong choice after another. All the while, Samantha is being held captive, strategizing how to escape before things escalate even more. Meanwhile, Aliya must fight to prove her innocence in the public eye and save her wife. But is safety ever truly possible for these women even after Samantha is rescued?

A provocative examination of suburban mores, Missing Sam captures the terror manifested in today’s political climate, and the real dangers, both physical and psychological, of being Brown and queer in America.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was leery of reading this expansion on the "be careful of your words, you do not which will be your last" aphorism. I took the DRC because I like stories by and about my lesbian siblings in Otherhood, and because I'm pretty damned sure we're going to see this kind of horror again in the future so I wanted to get it out there.

Sam and Ali are well-drawn, fully realized people. We see each one's PoV, so we know what Ali doesn't, that Sam is alive. It should diminish the stakes, yet Author Umgar uses the technique well enough that it did not.

I was, for the most part, glad to keep reading the story though as parents and social media and investigators kept becoming more toxic by the page I wanted to say, "Thrity! enough already!" When piling on the trouble the story begins to feel like the artificial construct it is. Never mind that reality does this ad more to people...fiction is different, plays by different rules. When COVID hit, I hit the wall. It took some time for me to come back.

After Sam is rescued, the true horror (for me) began: How do you put yourself...your wife...you entire life...back together after the sheer awfulness of what each of you has been through? What alchemy do you need to work in order to remake bonds that have been, without either one's volition, shattered? This horror was very well, very believably, explored. The ending was the culmination of multiple strands of un/making and remodeling.

What kept me from making a bigger fuss about the book was the dropped and abandoned threads, eg Kabir's development. I loved the challenged queer marriage that had to sustain or fail the spouses...it's the way reality is when you're in a committed relationship. The resolution Author Umrigar presents is pitch-perfect. I think the story of an immigrant, a Muslim, a queer woman, interacting with the power structures that see her as enemy Other, is one we should all reckon with.

It's not like the world is waiting for us to wake up to injustice on our own. It is ringing alarm bells and sounding klaxons and stories like this one are the easy way to see why waking up to it is so important.