Disappearing Act
A True Story
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Moving and evocative, Disappearing Act is a YA true-story-in-verse following author Jiordan Castle's coming of age as her family reckons with the aftershocks of her father's imprisonment.
It was the summer before high school,
the beginning of everything.
But also an end.
Jiordan’s family was never quite like everyone else’s, with her father’s mood swings, her mother’s attempts at normalcy, and her two older sisters with a different last name. But on the surface, they fit in.
Until the day the FBI came knocking on the door.
After that, her father’s mood plunged to a dangerous new low. After that, there was an investigation into his business and a sentencing in court. Soon Jiordan’s father would have to leave home, and her family would change forever.
Reckoning with the aftershocks of her father’s incarceration, Jiordan had to navigate friends who couldn't quite understand what she was going through, along with the highs and lows of first love. Under it all was the question: If Jiordan’s father was gone, why did she feel like the one who was disappearing?
Recounting her own experiences as a teenager, poet Jiordan Castle has created a searing and evocative young adult true-story-in-verse about the challenge to be free when a parent is behind bars.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A white and Jewish teen struggles to cultivate her own identity after her father is imprisoned in this striking verse memoir by Castle (All His Breakable Things, for adults). Thirteen-year-old Jiordan Castle's father is arrested for involvement in "a conspiracy to defraud the United States" the summer before her freshman year of high school. Through lyrical text, Castle highlights the pain felt and challenges faced by her two older half sisters, her mother, and herself after the FBI raids her home searching for her father. Carefully worded poems depict Castle's everyday insecurities—such as high school conflicts and difficulty navigating her first romantic relationship—alongside concerns about her father's safety in prison ("In movies they say don't drop the soap./ They say sleep with one eye open"). Though rendered primarily in verse, the novel features varied narrative formats, including redacted poems that emphasize the absences Castle feels in her life: "I'm trying to hide this story in plain sight. I'm trying to fill in the blanks." This moving account is an intense meditation on mental health and the prison system, as observed by Castle, who, according to an author's note, crafted this story "for the other children of prisoners." Ages 12–up.
