Oblivion

One year ago, Callie was found in an abandoned apartment, scrawling words on the wall: "I KILLED HIM. His blood is on my hands. His heart is in my soul. I KILLED HIM."

But she remembers nothing of that night or of the previous thirty-six hours. All she knows is that her father, the reverend at the Church of the Holy Promise, is missing, as is Hannah, a young girl from the parish. Their disappearances have to be connected and Callie knows that her father was not a righteous man. Since that fateful night, she's been plagued by graphomania—an unending and debilitating compulsion to write. The words that flow from Callie's mind and through her pen don't seem to make sense—until now.

As the anniversary of Hannah's vanishing approaches, more words and memories bubble to the surface and a new guy in school might be the key to Callie putting together the puzzle. But digging up the secrets she's buried for so long might be her biggest mistake.

About the Author :
Sasha Dawn teaches writing at community colleges and offers pro bono writing workshops to local schools. She lives in her native northern Illinois, where she collects tap shoes, fabric swatches, and tales of survival, and she harbors a crush on Thomas Jefferson. Her debut novel, Oblivion, was an Illinois Reads selection and one of the New York Public Library's best books for teens.

Review :
"Readers will feel unmoored until the last few pages of Oblivion, and that's all right; so does the story's narrator, Callie. Almost a year earlier, Callie was found in a deserted room scribbling 'I killed him,' more than a thousand times on a wall. At the same time, she developed graphomania and became someone who is impelled—to the point of terror, to the point of exhaustion—to write down the words screaming in her head. The police don't believe that Callie killed either her father, Pastor Palmer, or the 12-year-old who disappeared that day. But her journals of repetitive poetic ramblings obscure rather than illuminate the case. Literally raised in a church, Callie doesn't do normal. Her mother is in a mental institution after stabbing Palmer, whose persona alternates between man of God and sexual predator. Her new foster family has given her an upgraded life for which she's unprepared. When she finds herself clinging to her 'sister's' boyfriend, John, who's somehow related to the mystery, her world is jolted again. The book's intensity can be overwhelming. Callie's uncontrollable need to write—and the anxiety she feels when she can't—is communicated as if by osmosis. Though readers may wonder why foster parents so uninvolved would take Callie in or how she maintains good grades, these questions fade in the face of the incessant demands that the graphomania makes on both the characters and those turning the pages." —starred, Booklist