Magic Turns to Menace
By PAULA FRIEDMAN / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Anne Ursu's novel deals with family's torment after a child vanishes

Anne Ursu doesn't shy away from risks in her debut novel, The Disapparation of James.

When the Woodrow family goes to the circus to celebrate 7-year-old Greta's birthday, they hardly expect her younger, quieter brother to volunteer for the clown's most astonishing trick. James, surprisingly, agrees to climb onto the stage and let the clown make him disappear.

The Woodrows are delighted by James' unusual boldness, and by the trick itself, which leaves them wondering just exactly where their son has been so cleverly secreted. But by the end of the show, James still is nowhere to be found.

Ms. Ursu's story rides the line between a conventional (though disturbing) suspense tale and an altogether different kind of mystery ("disapparation," a term apparently known only to Ms. Ursu and J.K. Rowling, means to appear and disappear, now here, now there, with some element of magic involved). The first suspect in James' disappearance is Mike the Clown.

The police, along with Justin Woodrow, the boy's father, feel convinced that the clown must have orchestrated James' disappearance using an unseen assistant or two. Who was in a better position to know where a boy goes when a magician makes him "disappear?" But Mike claims to know nothing about the boy's whereabouts, insisting that James' disappearance was an "accident."

Primarily through Hannah, James' mother, Ms. Ursu contemplates this idea of a child vanishing, as if he can do so without anyone else's involvement: "Justin and Hannah need nothing else. They do not need to go over it in slow-motion or stop-motion because they know exactly what they just saw. Now Hannah and Justin Woodrow know that they live in a world where little boys can disappear into thin air."

While this notion of inexplicable disappearance seems intriguing, it serves in some ways as a thematic red herring in that the novel concerns itself most deeply with what happens to a family undergoing this particular sort of loss.

Ms. Ursu maps out each family member's tortured interior landscape through the musings of each character, and through Tom, the police officer stationed in the Woodrow house to field calls and watch over the family.

Tom takes special notice of Greta and comes to sympathize with the child's confusion and her almost uncanny practical wisdom. With Hannah deeply depressed and sleeping a good deal of the time, and Justin obsessed with tracking down and exposing the kidnapper, Greta has been left to fend for herself, and she does so with uncomplaining bravery.

In different ways, each family member must discover an inner courage to help them keep searching for James. Ms. Ursu takes a familiar subject and leads us to unexpected places. Whether or not we accept where she arrives, we will, nevertheless, be completely absorbed by the journey.

Freelance writer Paula Friedman lives in Oakland, Calif.