If You Can Hear This

If You Can Hear This is a light-hearted YA mystery that draws its strength from its quirky cast of characters and distinct setting. It is the fourth YA offering from author Faith Gardner whose previous novels include How We Ricochet, Girl on the Line, and The Second Life of Ava Rivers.

The story follows Posey Spade, a high school student new to the small town of Wild Pines in rural California. Posey is pulling herself together from losing her best friend and crush and also dealing with her mother’s abandonment. She moves to Wild Pines with her journalist father from San Francisco. Like her father, she is driven and motivated to be the best journalist she can be and hopes to pick up where she left off in San Francisco, where she won the Junior Muckraker Award, but Wild Pines is not San Francisco.

With no school paper for Posey to exercise her journalist chops, she is presented with the challenge of taking charge of and motivating the Wild Pines AV club, a group of self-proclaimed slackers. They resist her, but she soon discovers that each possesses a unique talent that she can utilize, and, when their teacher and club sponsor Molly Moses goes missing, Posey has the issue that can bring them together.

Posey leads her team as they create a podcast to help with the investigation into Ms. Moses’ disappearance. They set about interviewing the people close to Ms. Moses and the last people to see her including, Molly's husband Doug, the police investigating her disappearance, her co-workers, and various other quirky individuals who may know what happened. The tone is light, and Gardner does a great job in describing the many humorous, colorful characters that populate the narrative.

However, Posey is somewhat one dimensional completely focused on her career goals, which overshadows the reality that their teacher is missing and maybe the subject of foul play. She would be more relatable if more time was spent exploring her deeper emotional issues, and Gardner is at her best in the few passages when the writing focuses on Posey’s character as in the following passage.

“Posey nodded, not sure how to respond. Her breath got shorter, her stomach tightened, and she realized she was thinking about her mother. People left the people they claimed to love all the time. It happened every day. It happened sometimes without reasonable explanation. The realization was like a void opening below her, threatening to swallow her.”

While the premise of the story is intriguing, the plot languishes as Posey and her team go from interview to interview without an increase in stakes or tension, uncovering nothing that significantly turns or propels the investigation until far into the story.

All in all, If You Can Hear This is an easy-to-read, cozy mystery worth exploring because of its cast of quirky characters and a storyline that is easy to take in and follow.