AustLit

'“We lost all three girls that summer. Let them slip away like the words of some half-­remembered song …” It’s impossible to ignore Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Virgin Suicides when reading Felicity McLean’s debut novel, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone. The title itself is a nod to the trope of missing young women that so haunted the works of Joan Lindsay and Jeffrey Eugenides. Though cognisant of these influences, McLean’s book sings its own song.'  (Introduction)