Kala by Colin Walsh

Kala is a novel about teenage friendship and youth, revenge and forgiveness, as three adults find themselves back in their Irish hometown. Mush, Helen, and Joe haven’t really spoken in years, but they are all back in Kinlough, where they were friends as teenagers along with Kala, Aiden, and Aoife, but Kala’s disappearance in 2003 started the path of them falling out of touch. When human remains are found in the woods and two more teenage girls go missing, the three must face up to what they remember about the past and the secrets Kinlough is hiding.

The book is told from three perspectives, moving fluidly between the past and present as the narrative unfolds. It doesn’t take long to pick up the protagonists’ perspectives—Mush who never left, Joe who is famous and struggling with alcohol and fans, and Helen, who left and doesn’t know how to come back—and the many characters in the novel are vividly drawn (with the exception maybe of Aoife, who seems purposefully further outside of narrative, which I expected to go somewhere, but didn’t). By the end, you see a lot more of the complexities of the characters, and I almost wished to have seen just a bit more of their character development beyond the end, which perhaps shows how it draws you into their personalities and lives.

The combination of literary and thriller elements gives the book its pace and readability, and I think without one or the other it wouldn’t work, but instead it brings together a look at the innocence or ignorance of youth and the troubles of growing up from teenage friends with a suspenseful story of small town corruption and teenagers stumbling upon this. Kala is a good book to get immersed in and read in one sitting, with the tense plot making it more interesting than a book just about growing up in a small Irish town.