VANISH ME

A teenager goes looking for her rogue rock-star mother in Goldberg’s third YA novel in a series.

It’s 2014 in Eugene, Oregon, and Love Marvin is the daughter of grunge-music royalty. Her parents, Nico Sullivan and Evan Marvin, were the creative force behind the 1990s band Evanico. Nico hasn’t been a reliable presence in her daughter’s life since Love was a baby. Now Love is 16 and a grunge fanatic like her two best friends, Frankie and Caden. “I live like the cave people did,” Love brags, referring to her use of a Sports Walkman and flip phone, adding, “Frankie and Caden feel the same and we’ve dubbed our crew 9021-Hole, after two of our fav 90’s cultural touchstones.” Shortly after learning that Nico has gone missing—well, more missing than usual—Love discovers Nico’s old diary in the attic. The girl becomes convinced that it’s the key to finding her mom, and she convinces Evan to let her, Frankie, and Caden take a road trip down the coast to visit Nico’s parents in Los Angeles. Along the way, with the words of her mother in her brain and ’90s music in her ears, Love starts to unravel how she and Nico are similar and different. Goldberg is an undeniably skilled writer, and his prose vibrates with his characters’ vitality: “a woman with a sea of frizzy orange hair the color of Sunkist opens the door with a funky-looking cigarette stamped between her lips and a floating caftan hanging off her thin body.” However, both Nico and Love come off as grating, and neither of their portrayals is terribly convincing. For instance, would Nico really have described her own dresses as “Lilith Fair-esque” in 1998, just a few months after the first Lilith Fair festival? The book may appeal to the many present-day teens who own Nirvana T-shirts, but there’s a flimsiness to the narrative that prevents sincere emotions from taking root.

An energetically written but ultimately unpersuasive bit of ’90s nostalgia.