Review: "Since She's Been Gone" by Sagit Schwartz

Since She's Been Gone by Sagit Schwartz
Published February 2024 via Crooked Lane Books
★★★

These days, Beatrice—better known as Beans—is a successful psychologist. As a teenager, though, her mother's unexpected death turned her life upside down, and she spent months in treatment for an eating disorder. She recovered, but ED is still by her side when things get tough...and now, her entire world has tilted on its axis. Beans's mother might still be alive.

Since She's Been Gone is a fast-paced read, shifting between past (eating disorder with a side of grief) and present (mystery with a side of eating disorder). The mystery takes place over quite a short time frame, only a few days—this helps keep things moving, though I think I would have preferred a longer time frame to better get to know some of the supporting characters, particularly Eddie,* her boyfriend.

But the book is doing a number of things that are unusual here. This is one of a very, very few books I've read in which the protagonist is an adult who has had and recovered from an eating disorder, and one of even fewer in which the character—and the author—is a therapist and has the language to discuss the disorder with knowledge, nuance, and (yay) a general lack of numbers. (If the author does not have personal history or extensive professional knowledge about eating disorders, I would be quite surprised.) This probably sounds like an odd thing to get hung up on, but take it from someone who has a niche reading interest or two—it's unusual, and it's well done.

The time jumps didn't work quite as well for me. It might be that I read the book all in one go, or that the chapters are relatively short, but the shifts in time, while consistent, always felt a bit choppy to me. Because the book avoids the cliché so well in the present-day mental health narrative, I'm also rather disappointed that it uses one of the bigger clichés in YA eating disorder fiction: no spoilers, but Emily and her storyline could be plucked from (or dropped into) any number of books set in treatment centres, and it would be hard to tell the difference. Not the end of the world in a story, but I'd like to know how Emily could have helped to drive that timeline in a less expected way.

I won't go into the mystery much (by the time I read the book, I had completely forgotten what was in the book description, which is just the way I like my mysteries), but I'll say that it seems inspired by the Sackler family—if that's not a rabbit hole you've ever gone down, have fun with Wikipedia! And then look up Nan Goldin, because while she has nothing to do with this book she's done some effective advocacy work on the subject.

*Not to be confused with ED

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.