Liz DiRosa's One Brown Shoe

On an ordinary June night in a small Minnesota town, eighteen-year-old Liz DiRosa disappears into a crowd at the local pizza place. The next morning nobody knows where she went or what happened to her. Though her boyfriend remembers being with her, he cannot remember anything else. Maybe they had a fight. Maybe they were drunk. He simply does not know.

So begins the milestone summer of 1969, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and Teddy Kennedy dove into the Chappaquiddick. It’s the summer an iron-mining town near the Canadian border tried to find a powerful, popular girl, who thought she had the world in her grip. Her friends flail, hold a séance, fall in love with unlikely men and, ultimately, follow their own fates in the wake of her disappearance.

Liz DiRosa’s One Brown Shoe holds the reader tightly in its coming of age story, its haunting sense of loss and the shards of hope that glimmer throughout.