Galley Talk: The Year We Disappeared

-- Publishers Weekly, 6/19/2008

Carol Chittenden, owner of Eight Cousins Children’s Books in Falmouth, Mass., and children’s buyer for BookStream, talks about a fall ’08 title.

Years before I moved to Falmouth, relatives in the area told me, with awful fascination, about a local trash hauler whose connections with arson, murder and disappearances were always suspected, but never resulted in convictions. From a distance it seemed exciting. Once I opened a business in the town, it seemed more like one of those Seven Warning Signs of Cancer: benign—or malignant? The bitterly divided police department made the diagnosis look bad. Further incidents accumulated, and each one revived the record in the newspapers. Those accounts always made me feel conflicted: what, I always wondered, is my responsibility as a citizen and business person, and what on earth could I do about the very bad apple in our midst?

Then I received Bloomsbury’s September galley of The Year We Disappeared by Cylin Busby and John Busby, and slapped it atop the Priority stack. I recognized the name: John Busby is the policeman whom someone shot in the face just after Busby had arrested the trash hauler’s brother. (No arrests have ever been made.) Cylin Busby is John’s daughter, who was nine years old when the shooting occurred on August 31, 1979. In alternating chapters their book blows open the story, naming names, streets, neighborhoods, political affiliations, and friends of friends. I raced through the book, agog with recognition of both my community, and the very human account of facing terror every hour, day and night. Fear, the authors clearly show, eats away at everyone it touches. Though I love the book, it’s hard for me to be objective about something this close to home, so I’m looking forward to listserv discussions of it. We’re working closely and carefully with Bloomsbury to make the book everything it can be for readers and for our community. Bookstore staff is a little nervous about the outcome, but I feel we can do nothing less.