I liked the voice and tone of Picture Me Gone from the first page, which starts with 12-year-old Mila talking about her name: “The first Mila was a dog. A Bedlington terrier. It helps if you know these things,” she says, and then, a bit farther down the page: “I don’t believe in reincarnation. It seems unlikely that I’ve inherited the soul of my grandfather’s long-dead dog. But certain traits make me wonder” (1). Like a dog, or like Clever Hans, Mila is extremely observant. She can read a room, or someone’s mood, by picking up on little details that others miss. She can’t always articulate how or why she knows things, but often she can: it’s the accumulation of facts and circumstances, piles of mail or someone’s posture or the direction of someone’s gaze.
It’s good that Mila’s observant, because she has a lot to figure out: at the start of the book, she explains that she and her father, Gil, have been getting ready to travel from London to upstate New York, to visit her father’s oldest friend. (Gil hasn’t seen this friend, Matthew, for eight years.) But then the friend’s wife calls with strange news: her husband has disappeared, just left for work one day and didn’t come back, leaving her with his dog and their fourteen-month-old son. Mila and her dad decide to take the trip as planned: they’ll go to New York, and they’ll find Matthew.
I like how this book is a travel-story and a coming-of-age story and a puzzle-story all at once; I like how it is about how complicated life can be, and about how relationships (romantic, friendship, family) can work or not work, without being too heavy-handed about any of it. Also, yay for queer/bisexual visibility: there’s an adult character in this book who has been romantically involved with both men and women and is not presented as someone who used to be straight but realizes she is queer (or vice versa).
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