White Fox by Sara Faring (review)

Faring, Sara White Fox. Imprint/Macmillan, 2020 [416p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781250304520 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781250304537 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys Ad Gr. 7-10

Sisters Tai and Noni are returning to their former home on an isolated Mediterranean island where their family's pharm-tech organization continues to thrive and where their movie star mother Mireille Foix was last seen ten years ago. Tai soon uncovers White Fox, the script that Mireille was supposedly writing when she went missing. The script is basically a fairy tale, but there certainly allusions to events and people in their lives, so the two sisters—as opposite as two can be and drifting apart—must come together, tracking down a riddle-making florist, agoraphobic superfans, a Pokémon costume–wearing uncle, and a potentially murderous cousin. The book can't seem to choose between being a psychological thriller or campy horror, so it lands somewhere in the middle, with disparate parts about deadly pharmaceutical experiments, secret family pasts, overreaching AI, and toxic sibling dynamics never quite coalescing into a solid plot. The sisters share narration, and while each individually is interesting—Tai's the image-obsessed, insecure powerhouse, and Noni the passive-aggressive wallflower—their combined melodrama keeps emotions so high that it's almost impossible to tell when something actually important has happened. Most compelling here is the book's exploration of how memory distorts love, for better or for worse, and it questions how the affection for the memory of a person differs from the affection for an imagined, tech-generated person. It's that last point that will leave readers unsettled, and fans of Black Mirror may enjoy the interrogation of the line between humanity and technology.