With Delible, Vancouver writer and editor Anne Stone takes readers into the inner lives of two teenage girls, Melissa and Melora, coming of age in the Toronto suburbs in the early 1980s. The two sisters are close: only a year apart in age, and so similar physically they are often mistaken for one another (provided Melora is wearing Melissa’s glasses), they are intimate friends, and provide support for each other through the rituals of sex, drugs, drinking, and depression that accompany their adolescence.

When 16-year-old Melissa disappears, Melora is left as witness to both the events leading up to her disappearance and to its aftermath. Has her sister run away, or has she been abducted?

Stone has a strong ear for teenage patois, and Delible convincingly evokes the dark and dangerous milieu her characters inhabit both physically and emotionally. The dialogue is solid, and a pleasure to read, particularly in scenes that feature the sisters and their friends. Melora’s perspective is used to strong effect, allowing for an at-times uncomfortable immediacy, while sections told in the voices of her mother and grandmother grant a beneficial shifting of perspective.

Unfortunately, the novel doesn’t really cohere. The investigation into Melissa’s disappearance lacks substantial narrative urgency and has little impact. And while Stone does a servicable job getting under the veneer of these teenage girls, revealing the secrets and fears beneath their outward bravado, her insights are fairly pedestrian: there are no surprises here, nothing that readers haven’t seen before. (Whose lives are subject to greater scrutiny in fiction than those of teenage girls?)

Additionally, the novel fails to connect at an emotional level. It’s possible that the banality and the emotional distance are deliberate: Melissa and Melora are fairly “typical” girls, and the novel’s flat effect nicely mimics the cool distance both girls project. If this is the case, however, it is to the detriment of the novel as a whole. Despite the intimacy of the book, one comes away knowing little more of these girls than one would from encountering a fading “Have you seen…” poster following a child’s disappearance.