It all starts when Lauren sees the missing poster for Abby. When she knows she can find her, when she knows that Abby is talking to her.

Lauren never knew Abby before seeing the poster.

Then it’s Fiona. Fiona, the girl whose parents owned the carriage house she and her mother lived in. Fiona, who used to babysit Lauren periodically, and who decided one night she’d had enough and she was leaving. Running away. Locking Lauren in the closet so she could get away. Causing Lauren emotional trauma and not to mention physical discomfort and embarrassment.

It was always Fiona, from the start. It wasn’t Abby who was the first girl who went missing that Lauren knew she saw. Who haunted her.

But it’s not just Fiona and Abby. It’s Natalie. Then it’s Shyann. And Isabeth. And Madison. And Yoon-Mi. Maura. Kendra. All of these girls — all of these missing girls — Lauren can talk to. She knows their stories. She knows where they are.

The thing they all have in common, all of the girls, is that they’re 17.

And they’re gone.

There’s also the dream. The one which takes place in the same house Lauren grew up in, that she knows so well. Except now it’s filled with these girls — each of them has space in there. Each of them can talk to her. The house is warm. Smoky. Almost burning. Fiona always seemed to have a bit of control there. Even if it was Lauren’s dream, even if she was the one walking and talking and experiencing, somehow she was still under Fiona’s direction. As if Fiona was the person in charge of the house. As if Fiona was the person in charge of Lauren’s thoughts.

What could go wrong when Lauren chooses, then, to reach out to the families of these missing girls? When she is herself turning 17 and worried that her fate is just like that of those girls she knows are missing. The girls she knows and sees.

Nova Ren Suma’s 17 & Gone is a masterful exploration of the lines of madness. Paired with pitch-perfect prose that simultaneously propels the reader forward because of its fluidity and yet begs the reader to slow down and appreciate the singular choices in word and syntax, 17 & Gone is the kind of book you want to read at least twice. First, for the story. Second (and third and fourth) to see what parts of the story you missed the time before. What parts of the language, the turns of phrase, the evocative prose make those multiple readings and interpretations possible.

If you don’t want to be spoiled, I suggest skipping down to the final paragraph. But before doing that, it’s worth noting that I don’t necessarily think this is the kind of book that can be spoiled because it is so rich in possibilities and in interpretations that one person’s take isn’t the singular means of understanding it.

17 & Gone is, at heart, an exploration of mental illness. Lauren suffers from schizophrenia. Or at least, that’s what the psych ward wants to label her as, but they can’t quite put that diagnosis on her. Because schizophrenia requires more than a series of episodes; it’s the kind of illness that doesn’t manifest the same way in every individual. In this case, Lauren’s symptoms involve a few things. First, she fixates. These missing girls, the ones she believes she can see and talk to, are the product of her own research and fascination with the idea of missing girls. In other words, she’s spent a long time looking around the internet for girls who have been labeled as endangered missings. She’s learned their stories and absorbed them into her mind. They’ve become part of her. That she meets them in the house, the one she knows, is indicative of her letting them into her space. Into the world that is intimately hers.

But if only it were that simple. Suma doesn’t make it easy, and that is why this book — why her story telling more broadly — is so stand out.

Fiona, the second girl who enters Lauren’s mind, is actually someone Lauren knew in real life. She left an impression on Lauren. When Fiona chose to leave home, to run away with strange men, she caused trauma to Lauren that was long-standing. It happened in her own home. It happened in that intimate, safe space. That is why Fiona has control in the dreams, why it is she is the one running the operation. She’s the one who contributed to the rift in Lauren’s mind.

But if only it were that simple.

Fiona may not be one of those girls. One of the ones Lauren fixates on. What Suma forces the reader to do in this story is wonder: what’s real and what’s imaginary? What are the lines between the moments of mental insanity and the supernatural? The surreal? Is there maybe something to consider that people who suffer from such debilitating mental illnesses are themselves experiencing some kind of othering? Are they seeing and experiencing a world through an entirely different way than those who don’t? Can they interact with ghosts? The specters? How is it we can know what is and isn’t normal, what is and isn’t stable anyway?

Because what happens when Lauren gets out of the psych ward is that she sets fire to the place where Abby was last seen. And she finds a relic belonging to Abby. Abby is still alive.

Lauren solves the mystery in the real world and found the missing girl. So. What about the others?

One of the biggest challenges with reading this book — and it’s a challenge that’s not a criticism but a challenge of the story in and of itself — is that Lauren is very hard to know. Because things aren’t all right in her world and in her mind, readers are outside her thinking. They’re in the position that her boyfriend and her mother are. Readers are, in a sense, powerless to figuring out what is really going on because Lauren is, too. Because she can’t make sense of her world in the way that we do. At times, this is frustrating to the reader. You want to shake her and tell her to wake up. That what she’s doing isn’t okay. That meddling in the lives of people who are grieving isn’t good. But the thing is, we don’t even know the extent to which Lauren has done this. She shares the story of going and seeing Abby’s grandparents. That is the only way we know she’s done this. We don’t know about the letters she’s sent to other families.

She doesn’t tell the reader because she cannot tell the reader. She cannot lead us through because she cannot lead herself through.

Suma’s 17 & Gone could best be called magical realism, as it’s grounded in our world and the experiences present in our world, but our world looks, tastes, smells, and works with a question of whether or not it is our world at all. This is a novel about being on the precipice of becoming an adult and moving toward that great unknown. To the world where girls are missing and ghost shaped and malleable and yet so fully formed, real, and there. There’s then the question of whether it’s a world where Fiona gets to direct or Lauren gets to be the one in charge. What of our histories can define us or mold us or ultimately offer insight into our deepest, darkest, toughest-to-access selves?

17 & Gone is a marvelous, sumptuous, literary novel that is not easy to forget. Readers who loved Suma’s Imaginary Girls will see many similarities in story telling and be satisfied. It’s a knock out of a book. This is a novel about what it means to be lost and what it might mean to be found. Suma leaves readers with more questions than answers, but that makes this book so damn special. That’s what makes a reader want to go back, to experience again, and to reconsider the first thoughts they had. 17 & Gone is a book you want to talk about.

17 & Gone is available today. In full disclosure, Nova and I have a professional relationship — she and I presented together at Kid Lit Con.