Reviewed by Emily-Jane Hills Orford for Readers' Favorite

How We Disappear: Novella and Stories by Tara Lynn Masih tells readers of “All these faces with stories, good and bad.” Have you ever heard of face blindness? It’s called prosopagnosia. It means the inability to recall a face. Others are quite the opposite – they can’t forget a face. That is a useful tool to help law enforcers find missing people or criminals. Some people might think they can blend into oblivion, but, in reality, no one goes missing forever. There’s always someone who’ll recognize the ghost, the person trying to blend into the woodwork, so to speak, to hide in plain sight. Their stories are compelling.

Tara Lynn Masih’s How We Disappear ventures into the intriguing art of hiding in plain sight. Some of the stories are told as first-person narratives, while others are related in the third person. Each tale has its plot, its mystery, and its intriguing subterfuge. The stories cover a wide range of possibilities, from missing people to criminals trying to hide their crimes, as well as people abducted and presumed lost for good. Runaways, exiles, wanderers, and even ghosts. Then there’s the case of Agatha Christie and her mysterious disappearance, a woman who hid behind her music and her writing, a woman whose mystery novels conjured up as much intrigue as her life itself. Every life is full of emotional upheavals, and a landscape of identity and circumstances. In this book, the author weaves one compelling narrative after another until the reader is enthralled by the endless list of historical and contemporary stories about lives that were never really lost. A most engaging read.