Why a Booktrail?
1992, 2000s: Young girls disappear from a school concert by the river.
The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone
What you need to know before your trail
‘We lost all three girls that summer. Let them slip away like the words of some half-remembered song and when one came back, she wasn’t the one we were trying to recall to begin with.’
Tikka Molloy was eleven and one-sixth years old during the long hot summer of 1992, growing up in an isolated suburb in Australia surrounded by encroaching bushland. That summer, the hottest on record, was when the Van Apfel sisters – Hannah, the beautiful Cordelia and Ruth – mysteriously disappeared during the school’s Showstopper concert, held at the outdoor amphitheatre by the river. Did they run away? Were they taken? While the search for the sisters unites the small community, the mystery of their disappearance has never been solved.
Now, years later, Tikka has returned home and is beginning to make sense of that strange moment in time. The summer that shaped her. The girls that she never forgot.
Locations
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Lose yourself in the Australian desert and valleys of NSW with the Van Apfel Girls
Set in a fictional valley not far from Sydney, this is a remote and unforgiving place. One where young girls go missing and where a huge search is undertaken. The girls disappear from their school concert outside, near a river. The landscape is raw, remote, unfriendly and chilling. A normal setting of a school concert turns into something much worse.
“That valley had smelled bad long before any of the Van Apfel girls ever went missing there. Even from our home high on the western rim, the stench would waft up the fully and smack us in the face on a hot dry day.”
“The valley was deep and wide. Trees covered both walls. Spindly, stunted she-oaks spewed from the basin, swallowing the sunlight and smothering the tide with their needles.. Higher up there were paperbacks, and tea trees with their camphorous lemon smell. Then hairpin, baksias, river dogroses and gums of every kind….”
” At school we called the valley the ‘bum crack'”
The novel regularly references the Lindy Chamberlain case where a young baby was taken from a camp site by a dingo close to Ayres Rock. The mother was suspected of the murder as the baby was never found. She was cleared of murder years later when the baby’s clothes were found near a dingo’s lair.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone
Destination : Australia Author/Guide: Felicity McLean Departure Time: 2000s
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