Quantum Girl Theory

Name: Quantum Girl Theory
Brand: Penguin Random House
Availability: InStock
Author: Erin Kate Ryan
ISBN: 9780593556016

Author: Erin Kate Ryan

Narrator: Saskia Maarleveld, Joniece Abbott-Pratt, P.J. Ochlan

Unabridged: 9 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Random House Audio

Published: 03/08/2022

Categories: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Women, Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Part detective novel, part ghost story, this brilliant debut asks a tantalizing question: What really happens when a girl goes missing?

“A thrilling, many-faceted, gothic novel: Erin Kate Ryan’s Quantum Girl Theory belongs in the same company as the work of Shirley Jackson and Carmen Maria Machado.”—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—CrimeReads

Mary Garrett has a gift for finding missing girls, a special kind of clairvoyance she calls “the sight.” Lured by a poster and the promise of a reward, she arrives at a small town in the Jim Crow South to discover that not one but three girls have vanished—two of whom are Black, and whose disappearances have gone uninvestigated outside their own community. She sets out to find them.

As it turns out, Mary is herself a “missing girl.” In another life, she was a Bennington College sophomore named Paula Jean Welden, who disappeared one night in 1946. The case captivated the nation’s imagination, triggering front-page headlines, scores of dubious sightings, and a wave of speculation: Who was Paula Jean, really, and why had she disappeared?

As Mary’s search for the three missing girls intensifies, so do the glimpses of Paula Jean’s other possible lives: She is a circus showgirl hiding from her past, a literary forger on the verge of being caught, a McCarthy-era informant in love with a woman she meets in a Communist cell. With the signals multiplying, the locals beginning to resent her presence, and threats coming from all sides, Mary wonders whether she can trust anyone—most of all herself.

Both a captivating mystery and a powerful thought experiment, Quantum Girl Theory spins out a new way of seeing those who seem to disappear before our eyes.

Reviews

Goodreads review by erin on January 14, 2022

Quantum Girl Theory is a meandering, cross-temporal musing on the mystery of missing girls. Drawing inspiration from the case of Paula Welden, a Bennington college student who disappeared in 1946, this book follows a few strands of plots centering around what may have happened to Paula and who she b......more

Goodreads review by Allison on February 11, 2022

This is a beautiful and dangerous book that will haunt me for a long time. The prose is elegant and playful. The story is, too. In other books, when a girl goes missing, she is erased. In other books, we get the story of the people around her: their grief, their search, their revenge. But this book......more

Goodreads review by Cat on February 05, 2022

I was attracted to this book because the premise is based on a true crime: a young woman disappears while hiking and is never seen again. The proposition is that this girl went on to become a seeker of other lost girls, a clairvoyant of sorts. This is a captivating concept, but the focus is continua......more

Goodreads review by Lilibet on March 16, 2022

This book is so much more than what it says on the box (or, in the blurb, if you will). This is no run-of-the-mill historical fiction or women’s detective mystery. This book is part lyrical prose, part ghost story, part historical fiction, part detective story, part suspense, part thriller, and a wh......more

Goodreads review by Sof on November 13, 2023

SO fucking good. i wrote my undergrad thesis on hangsaman / shirley jackson and specifically fell down the rabbit hole of paula welden’s disappearance, so to read this was deeply unsettling and reparative in a way? all the potential lives and experiences a missing girl might’ve had—how she becomes m......more

Quotes

“Fascinating . . . Ryan’s deep and simmering novel follows how the stories of missing girls become co-opted into other narratives, and how, in the process, they become other people.”—CrimeReads, “Most Anticipated of 2022”

“Quantum Girl Theory is a doubly impressive feat—a dark, dizzying mystery about the fate of three missing girls in 1960s North Carolina studded with a series of elegant meditations on loss, violence and identity. It stayed with me long after I put it down.”—Alexandra Andrews, author of Who Is Maud Dixon?

“Clever and imaginative, Quantum Girl Theory is a dazzling, dizzyingly fresh take on the missing person narrative, a novel full of insight into the lives of girls and women.”—Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles

“Inventive . . . Ryan’s novel takes up what true-crime aficionados would call the ‘less dead’: victims of violence or missing people from marginalized communities who fail to garner the same attention as idealized victims—namely, straight young White women. Ryan takes a meta approach here; the novel is as much about the way we mythologize this type of missing and murdered victim as it is a twisty mystery. . . . A puzzler that is both brainy and full of satisfying narrative brawn.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Intriguing . . . [Ryan] has a knack for clever turns of phrase and imbues her concept with smart insights on the public’s fascination with missing girls and young women.”—Publishers Weekly