Book Review: And Don’t Look Back by Rebecca Barrow

Harlow Ford has been running with her mother Cora from an unknown something for as long as she can remember in And Don’t Look Back by Rebecca Barrow. Now just shy of eighteen, she’s gotten practiced at quietly leaving whatever town they’d been living in and slipping into a new life, miles away, for whatever spurious reason her mother feels is compelling them to move. 

Harlow’s goal has always been to assimilate, to be just another face in the crowd, and for almost all her life, she’s been successful at this, even if it means tamping down all her real feelings and desires. Being good at something, of course, doesn’t mean you actually like doing it:

Harlow wonders why she ever thinks things are going to change. Again–this has been her life since before she can remember. Always the two of them, and nobody else. And always the threat following them. Someone–something–on their heels who poses great danger if they catch up to them. That is really as much as Harlow has ever gotten from her mom. When she was little, it didn’t register as strange to her; it was just a fact of life, a thing she thought everybody else experienced too, to the point where when in second grade a girl name Olive said her family was moving, Harlow said, “Oh no, did the chaser catch you?”

She’s learned a lot about coping and keeping secrets since then, but she’s getting tired. When the worst happens and her mother is fatally injured, Harlow is torn between continuing her mother’s legacy of running or finally finding some answers. As a dutiful daughter, she goes to the security deposit box Cora had pointed her in the direction of as Cora lay dying. The contents come as a shock. The large wad of cash and new IDs to enable Harlow to keep running are less of a surprise than the photographs of young Cora as a child and a teenager. Most surprising of all, however, is a deed to a house in a town called Crescent Ridge with Cora’s name on it.

Determined to finally learn the truth, Harlow decides to head to the Pacific Northwest where Crescent Ridge is situated and figure out what compelled her mom to choose such a peripatetic lifestyle for them. Still wary after such a long time spent keeping secrets and distrusting strangers, she gradually discovers that her mom was one of three sisters raised in a secluded house in the woods by a single mother named Eve. When Eve abruptly disappeared one day, the whole town kept vigil for the return of the bubbly, beautiful mother.

Was something about Eve’s disappearance the impetus for Cora going on the run? The more that Harlow discovers, though, the bigger grows the puzzle of trying to figure out her mother’s motivations:

That’s the problem with everything, she thinks: too many possible meanings, things that could be significant or mean nothing, occurrences that could be warnings or not. Did Eve keep them out here because she was scared, or because she enjoyed the simplicity of it all? Did her mom run because of what happened to Eve, or was she just desperate to escape the claustrophobia of the woods? Things changed, depending on how you looked at them, depending on how much weight you were putting on them.

The obscuring power of lies and silence is one of this twisty thriller’s greatest themes, as Harlow struggles to make sense of her mother’s life and figure out her own place in the world. I gasped aloud several times at the perfect execution of Rebecca Barrow’s plot twists, even as I greatly appreciated the centering of mixed-race and LGBTQ+ characters. As a writer, Ms. Barrow wholly understands how to craft a solid story out of shadows that gradually coalesce around a compelling main character you’ll be rooting for all the way. To say anything more would be to ruin the excellent surprises of Rebecca Barrow’s And Don’t Look Back.