“You’re not telling me everything.”
“No, I am not.”
“Why?”
She stood by the window; sprinkles beat the pane.
“Because I’m still afraid. And you should be too.”
“Of what?”
“Of what happens,” Mrs. Sinnard said, “when your uncle is around.”
On February 8, 2004, in the mysterious research facility known as Limetown, three hundred and twenty seven men, women, and children disappeared without a trace.
This is not their story. Not really.
The brand new prequel novel to the hit podcast Limetown features the podcast’s two pivotal characters: Emile Haddock, the mysterious Man They Were All There For, and Lia Haddock, Emilie’s seventeen-year-old niece. In investigations separated by decades, Lia and Emile both search for answers to questions about their families and their own identities, stalked by the specters of the people who control every step of their investigations, and the people they love but have never really understood.
I’ve been looking forward to this book ever since it was announced months ago, but I’ve also been a little worried. After all, we already know what happened during the Panic at Limetown (or we had better know; if you haven’t listened to the podcast then put down the review and go listen before I spoil anything), so wouldn’t a prequel be maybe a little bit predictable?
Ha. No. There’s so much information we didn’t already know about Emile and Lia’s families. Maybe enough for another multi-episode podcast. Possibly two.
It took me a little while to get into the “voice” of the teenage Lia Haddock, mostly because the writers did such a good job of showing us a young girl who only has the seeds of the woman she’ll become. The bright, cheerful, determined and hopeful radio announcer started out as an equally bright, determined, and very withdrawn seventeen-year-old. For some reason, Lia finds it hard to care about other people, about making human connections. The death of a high school classmate mostly makes her a little…wistful. Sad not about the loss of a person, but for the loss of a potential relationship, the boy Lia was supposed to pair off with simply because that’s what human beings are supposed to do.
A journalism class gives Lia a spark of…something. A goal, a way to actually care about an outcome, even if it means breaking some rules. A lot of rules (shades here of the Lia who will completely ignore orders by her bosses to not meet Limetown survivors in person). Lia’s isolation, her need to search for something that will explain her identity, and her willingness to throw away a job or a class or a relationship only gets worse when her mother, Alison, starts acting very strangely about a month before the Panic. Lia becomes more and more frustrated as her mother starts disappearing for days at a time, first physically, and then emotionally, and neither of her parents will tell her what the hell is going on.
“This isn’t you,” she said. “This isn’t the daughter I raised.”
Lia turned from the window. “And who are you? Today, I mean. The dutiful teacher? The disappearing wife?”
“Apple.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Lia.”
“Alison.”
“I’m not here to argue with you,” her mother said.
“And yet.”
(I love the economy the writers use with dialog, with descriptions. Short bursts of conversations, exposition given by the characters in very brief paragraphs, and ways of summarizing everything you can feel about a total lack of information in just one sentence.)
The government continued to claim the Limetown Commission’s investigation was ongoing, but they spoke to the public with the same tone a weary parent tells a pestering child: “We’ll see.”
Emile’s chapters were easier to get into, mostly because every one of them is new information about this strange figure who was supposedly the entire reason that Limetown existed at all. Twenty-five years before the Panic, Emilie was living a life of quiet despair in a backwater town, vaguely missing a mother who no one talks about, protected by a patient but 
weary brother, and routinely ignored by legal guardians who don’t seem to know that the emotion of “affection” even exists. And then you have Emile’s ever-present but barely-explained power to read minds. You’d think something like that would make life easier (or at least manageable) and yet so often it makes things go very, very wrong.
The chapters alternate between Emile’s attempts to run away from his latest disaster, and Lia’s parallel attempts years later to find out what happened to Emile and to the person her mother used to be before she turned into this oddly obsessed sister-in-law who can’t let the disappearance of Lia’s uncle go. And that’s pretty much all the detail I can give you about their stories, because there are great big revelations and gigantic betrayals here, and also callbacks to the podcast, cameos by familiar figures, hints about what’s going to happen, and even the rationale for why Limetown was designed the way it was. We learn more about the shadowy figures behind Limetown, although not everything, and I can’t decide which is the scarier idea, that they’re all-powerful and controlling the world from behind the scenes, or just ordinary business types with big dreams, people who can make stupid mistakes but still know just the right lever and just how much pressure to use in order to get whatever they want.
See, there’s always something that can be taken away.
Part of what makes the book frustrating is also what grounds it, gives it that sense of creeping dread, and keeps Emile’s secret power from turning it into a sci-fi horror book: so many of the characters’ decisions don’t make sense, because that’s exactly how human beings behave. We obsess, we act on the spur of the moment, we lash out and do selfish things that we regret for the rest of our lives while at the same time rationalizing all of it. Lia and Emile are manipulated and led around and betrayed in great big ways, and then they still go along with the next lead, the next promise. Even if it’s stupid and it will only lead to more betrayal, they still take the bait because doing otherwise would be deciding that a huge chunk of their lives was a waste.
Even if it was.
“What has he brought you that didn’t end in misery and pain?”
I’m not sure if I can recommend reading this book before listening to the Limetown podcast. There’s so much going on here that can make it a stand-alone story, and yet I feel like a lot of the power of the story would be missing if you didn’t know why some of these events are a great big deal. I have questions about how the Lia who learns all of this as a teenager is the same Lia who seems shocked at her connection with Limetown in the podcast (and completely ignorant of all the people who were involved and why), but I’m holding out hope that the writers will find a frightening way to connect all of it in Season Two.