Memories do strange things to people sometimes. In Simone van der Vlugt's The Reunion Sabine Kroese will find that some memories are best left undisturbed. When Sabine was fifteen her best friend Isabel disappeared. Sabine and Isabel grew up together in the small seaside town of Den Helder, and one sunny summer afternoon Isabel rides her bike in the direction of the Dark Dunes to meet someone and is never heard from again.
Nine years later Sabine is living and working in Amsterdam. She reads a small notice in the newspaper announcing a reunion at her old school, Helder High. She doesn't plan to attend, but all of a sudden old memories are being stirred up. Sabine has a faulty memory. She's recovering from a nervous breakdown that's kept her out of work for months. After the disappearance of her friend when she was younger, she simply shut down. Whatever happened to Isabel traumatized Sabine to the point where she has repressed memories of that day and now has only vague recollections of it.
Narrated in the first person, Sabine slowly reveals to the reader how her friendship with Isabel, once strong and deep, somehow took a turn for the worse as they grew into teenagers. At one time the two were inseparable; Sabine looked after her friend who suffered from occasional fits due to epilepsy. It's no secret that kids can be cruel to each other, however. Isabel grew into an attractive young woman able to twist any man around her little finger at will, and somehow Sabine simply was left behind. Isabel became the popular girl with a flock of friends around her and Sabine became the outsider, and you know how troublesome outsiders find it to fit in with the popular kids.
The problem is, it's happening all over again to Sabine. Returning to work in her administrative position in a city bank, she's found that the woman she hired before her breakdown has now usurped her position. Sabine can barely function part time in the hostile environment that her coworker has created for her. And now she finds that she's having flashbacks to that day when Isabel disappeared, revealing she may have witnessed the crime. If there was one. Isabel's body was never found. The only bright spot in Sabine's life is Olaf who also works at the bank, a friend of her older brother's that she's only recently met up with again.
This is an anxious, claustrophobic story. You know something's not right, but you're not sure what. There's an aura of uncertainty throughout the entire story. You know how unreliable first person narrators can be, especially ones with faulty memories. Sabine (and the reader as well) begins questioning everyone she was close to as a teenager, her brother, his friends (including Olaf and a boy she had been secretly dating). The Reunion is a nicely suspenseful thriller that can easily be read in a weekend. Gloomy, overcast skies and rainy afternoons recommended (that was my weekend weather anyway, which only aided in the already oppressive atmosphere of the novel), but not required. I believe this is Dutch author Simone van der Vlugt's first thriller, though she is already a popular children's author in the Netherlands. Hopefully it won't be her last.