Whistle in the Dark by Emma Healey - review: teen spirit takes a wrong turn, to the fury of mother

“This has been the worst week of my life,” says Jen Maddox, the narrator of Whistle in the Dark. The declaration is one of the few certainties in the novel, otherwise a limbo of evasions, stalemates and unresolved arguments.

This “worst week” refers to the unexplained disappearance of Jen’s 15-year-old daughter, Lana, for four days in the wilderness of the Peak District. Lana says she can’t recall what happened to her. The police shrug; Jen finds this maddening. The novel follows the fallout from the disappearance — the frustrating two-step, as Jen probes her daughter, and Lana withdraws.

Of course, there’s more beneath the surface. Fictional teenagers are rarely content, though Lana is more miserable and irascible than many of her tribe. She is depressed, and in therapy after a suicide attempt. She self-harms. She is vicious and directs much of her energy at her mother. About midway through, there are a series of consecutive, relentless chapters, each a micro-vignette of Lana spearing Jen with the stupid, gratuitous insults of a teen in attack mode (“Can you not breathe like that?”).

But Jen handles Lana with little empathy. She follows her daughter to school, she stalks her on social media. She does not listen when Lana occasionally opens up to her. She is frantic with anxiety about her; it feels authentic but it is also exhausting. You sympathise with both of them but also, at points, with neither of them. Lana could be a liar, or could be suffering from PTSD; Jen is both overbearing and herself depressed.

Chapters are short and episodic, though not chronological; the book pitches back and forth, fleshing out the present with the past. The perspective is Jen’s, though her narration does not always feel reliable — especially as the book draws to its finish. Her mission to work out what happened to Lana drives her mad — and it can have the same effect on the reader. There is also a religious cult subplot that doesn’t come off, that suggests the book will take a supernatural bent.

The answer to Lana’s disappearance is, of course, more pedestrian than supernatural, though it comes too late to gratify and feels rather hurried. The book isn’t quite decisive enough to thrill, though it is rich with emotional depth and serves as a reminder of why you’d never want to return to the anguish of adolescence again.

Whistle in the Dark by Emma Healey (Viking, £12.99), buy it here.