Look, I need to complain about something before we get into this. The genre tags on this audiobook list it under Science Fiction & Fantasy and Horror. Horror! I spent the first hour braced for some supernatural twist — a ghost daughter, a demonic dormmate, something — and what I got was a mother spiraling through campus parking lots and texting her college freshman too many times. Which, honestly? As someone who watches eighteen-year-olds every day and knows their parents? That IS horror. Just not the kind the genre tag promises.
So let me recalibrate your expectations right now, because this book deserves to be judged for what it actually is, not what some algorithm decided to shelve it as.
The Helicopter Parent as Unreliable Narrator
Kelly Simmons does something sneaky here that I didn't fully appreciate until about hour five. Maggie O'Farrell — and yes, I kept mentally confusing her with the actual author Maggie O'Farrell, which was its own private distraction — is not your standard worried mother protagonist. She's a woman whose anxiety has become her entire identity, and Simmons never lets you forget it. The early chapters pile on Maggie's compulsive check-ins, her drive-bys past Emma's dorm, the way she catalogs every unanswered text like evidence in a prosecution. You're meant to roll your eyes at her. And then Emma vanishes, and suddenly Maggie's paranoia looks less like a character flaw and more like prophecy.
This is what the author is really saying, and it took me a while to hear it: the book isn't asking "what happened to Emma?" so much as it's asking "what happens to a woman whose worst instincts turn out to be right?" That's a more interesting question than most domestic suspense novels bother with.
The dual narration between Maggie and Emma's perspectives is where the structure earns its keep. Emma's sections — delivered in a younger, more clipped register by Libby McKnight — reveal a girl who's been performing independence the way my students perform having done the reading. Convincingly enough to fool most people, but with gaps that give her away. The "Future Husband" contact in Emma's phone is a genuinely unsettling detail, and Simmons parcels out the context behind it with good instincts for when to hold back.
Libby McKnight at 1.0x — A Test of Patience and Principle
Here's where I have to be honest. I listened to this at my usual 1.0x speed — because the author chose those words, and I choose to hear them properly — and around hour three, during a faculty meeting where Principal Martinez was explaining new attendance software (sorry, still not listening), I understood why some listeners crank this to 2.25x.
McKnight's narration is clear. Emotionally present. Her Maggie voice carries this tight-throated quality, like a woman perpetually on the edge of calling 911, and it works. Her Emma voice drops the tension, goes flatter, more guarded — and that contrast between the two perspectives is genuinely effective storytelling through performance. McKnight's ability to differentiate voices is on full display in Secret Next Door as well. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation, and she uses silence well when Maggie processes each new disturbing discovery about Emma's campus life.
But — and this is a real but — the pacing drags. Not because McKnight is doing anything wrong, exactly, but because she treats every passage with the same deliberate weight. Maggie's panicked internal monologue gets the same measured delivery as her describing what she had for lunch. By hour six, I found myself wishing for some variation in tempo. The emotional scenes land. The connective tissue between them feels like wading through something thick.
For most listeners, I'd say bump it to 1.25x. It hurts me to say that. But it's true.
Women's Fiction Wearing a Thriller's Coat
The mystery of Emma's disappearance is serviceable, but it's not the engine here. The dormmates who seem "more sinister than friendly" are less threatening than they are just... college kids being weird and cliquish, which again — I see every day, and Simmons captures the particular cruelty of eighteen-year-old social dynamics pretty well. The empty dorm room where Emma supposedly lived is a solid set piece. But if you're coming in expecting Gone Girl pacing or Sharp Objects darkness, you'll be disappointed.
What Simmons actually delivers is a story about a mother confronting the fact that she never really knew her daughter — and that maybe she was too busy monitoring Emma's location to notice Emma's actual life. That's a quieter, sadder revelation than any thriller twist, and it's where the book finds its real power. That same understated power runs through Spool of Blue Thread: A novel, another story built on what families leave unspoken.
This reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing — you can omit things if you know them, and the reader will feel their presence. Simmons knows the shape of this mother-daughter disconnect intimately, and the details she omits from Maggie's understanding are as telling as the ones she includes.
My students would hate this. They'd call it slow, they'd call it a "mom book." And they wouldn't be entirely wrong. But there's something in Maggie's desperate campus searches that stuck with me — this image of a woman walking through a world designed for people half her age, looking for proof that her child still exists in it.
Who Gets an A, Who Gets a Hall Pass
If you loved Little Fires Everywhere or The Good Daughter, this is their spiritual successor — domestic tension built on the fault lines between parents and the adults their children become without permission. Fans of women's fiction with a suspense wrapper will find a lot to sit with here.
Skip it if you need your thrillers to actually thrill. And definitely skip it if you can't tolerate a slow narrative pace, because even at increased speed, this one ambles.
The Red Pen Says
Worth your time if you adjust expectations and maybe the playback speed. Simmons writes a convincing portrait of maternal anxiety that goes beyond the usual missing-girl formula, and McKnight's dual performance — despite the pacing issues — gives both women distinct interior lives. It's not the book the genre tags promise. But it might be a better book than that one would've been.
