On a summer day in the small town of Griever's Mill (population 3,004), "a roiling mass" of darkness rolls in, leaving "a sky that looked like a liquid bruise and sounded like a steel bridge on the verge of collapse." Eleven-year-old Ben and his 12-year-old brother, Pete, witness the harrowing aftermath: across the globe, adults are turning into obsidian glass statues. To make matters worse, the glassified victims soon start shattering. When an enigmatic voice on the radio suggests a radical plan to end the glass plague, Ben and Pete find themselves in opposition, with Ben racing to find another way to protect his family before it's too late.
Kurt Kirchmeier effectively uses a supernatural event to explore the many faces of grief in his debut, The Absence of Sparrows. Kirchmeier presents a family falling apart, and validates all of the characters and their coping methods, including Dad, who's using physical labor as a way of "erasing the past and fixing the future through sheer exhaustion," and Ben, who reminisces about his Sunday visits to a tea shop with Mom. Ben's nostalgic way of dealing with loss is felt in the details Kirchmeier includes--a general store, a Polaroid camera, a pair of "schoolyard menaces"--that call back to a simpler time. The timeless setting implies this kind of tragedy can happen anywhere at any time, and ratchets up the quiet fear that builds throughout the story.
With its swiftly moving plot and impending sense of dread, this coming-of-age horror novel is gripping and affecting. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader