In a nutshell, Sorry I Missed You about three women who rent out different floors in a remodeled house that has ghosts in the attic. Literally. There are strange sounds coming from up there at all hours of the day and especially the night, and not even the landlord has a key to access that part of the house. To make things even more strange, each of the women has items mysteriously show up in their suites or go missing entirely.
The book is told from four different points of view: the three housemates and Larry, the landlord. You've got Mackenzie, who is in college, living in the basement suite, Sunna, who is in her 30s, living on the main floor, and Maude, who's in her 60s, on the upper floor. The women are unlikely companions to say the least, but when a half-destroyed letter arrives in the mail saying "Sorry I missed you" and wanting to meet at an area coffee shop, each of them has reason to believe the letter was meant for them. So they team up and start staking out the coffee shop, sharing their truths and vulnerabilities and forging a strange friendship between them. Meanwhile, there's Larry, bumbling his way through the story and filling in some of the blanks along the way.
The twist at the end not only explained everything (including the ghosts) but was hilariously perfect. There were also some pretty good messages woven into the storyline. I found the themes of second chances and finding closure in tough situations to be particularly poignant.
To avoid spoilers, skip to the end of this post.
***Spoilers***
Larry Finley has just inherited his late aunt's house, but due to all the stipulations laid out in the will, he can't live in it. He also can't sell it, either, so he decides to do the next best thing: renovate it and rent it out. Oh, and he won't tell his new tenants about the ghosts in the attic. They'll find out soon enough.
It doesn't take long for Larry to find tenants. Maude takes the upstairs suite, Sunna gets the main floor, and Mackenzie moves into the basement level. The three women have nothing in common except that they've been ghosted by important people in their lives. They don't truly even get along, especially Maude and Sunna. But when a letter arrives damaged in their mailbox, each of the ladies feels as if it was meant for her.
The letter's writer apparently tried to see someone at the house, writing "Sorry I missed you." While half of the letter, including the sender's name, is missing, Maude, Sunna, and Mackenzie are able to determine that whoever wrote it wants to meet the intended recipient at an area coffee shop. So they all agree to go there together and stake it out until one of the possible senders shows up. With each subsequent trip, the women learn more about each other and how they ended up where they are now.
Maude
Maude is in her 60s. She never married and has no children, but she was a successful florist. After she retired, she decided to try her hand at dating and met Richard at a speed-dating event. A few months after they started dating, he proposed, but on their wedding day, Richard didn't show up. When Maude called him, she discovered that he was drunk as a skunk, had no real reason for not being there, and he hung up on her. Eventually, Maude sold off most of her belongings and moved into the new apartment with nothing but a couch, table and chairs, and her cat, Janet.
Eventually, after Maude does some very inappropriate and invasive snooping about her dead and missing sisters, Mackenzie convinces her to call Richard. They meet at the coffee shop with Sunna and Mackenzie as support, and Richard explains what happened. He tells Maude that he got scared because he started thinking about how much it hurt to lose his first wife to cancer and couldn't stomach the thought of going through something like that again. He doesn't even remember talking to Maude on the phone on their wedding day. Originally, Maude walks away from Richard, but she eventually gives him another chance, and they finally tie the knot at the end of the book.
Sunna
Sunna is in her 30s and has been largely unsuccessful in her life. She was ghosted by Brett, her best friend since college.
The two of them had been growing apart ever since Brett became social media famous. They had a big fight in which Sunna accused Brett of being fake and Brett accused Sunna of being jealous, but their friendship didn't end there. The two kept meeting for coffee every week until one week Brett didn't show up. She never called, and Sunna never saw or spoke to her again. Then, her gym decided to send her to work at their new location in Regina, landing Sunna right smack in the middle of Maude and Mackenzie.
Sunna never does confront Brett, but she does a lot of growing over the course of the book. When she moves to Regina, she realizes just how empty her life truly is. At first, going to the coffee shop is something she does almost out of spite (mainly toward Maude who she is constantly at odds with), but even after she admits to herself that Brett did not send the note, she keeps going back to the coffee shop for the companionship. She eventually becomes sort of like a leader for their odd little group. She acts almost like an older sister for Mackenzie, while simultaneously trying to be a little more like her (Sunna is a bit rude and abrasive, more blunt than polite), and during Maude's confrontation with Richard, she helps to ensure that Richard actually explains things instead of trying to lay all of the blame at Maude's feet.
Mackenzie
Mackenzie is college aged and always paranoid and afraid. She was ghosted by her ex-boyfriend, Jared.
When she was 13, Mackenzie's twin sisters, who were adopted, disappeared. One was found dead and the other is still considered missing. The case has been reopened after an anonymous tip was called in with new information that leads to an arrest. Turns out, Mackenzie is who called the tip in. She's been withholding information about her sisters for the last six years. She admits everything to Sunna on her way to see her parents after they find out.
Mackenzie knew that her sisters were trying to find their biological family. She knew that they had discovered a guy named "Owen" who claimed to be their biological brother. Owen told them that he thought he'd found their birth mother, but he needed money to get to California to meet her. On the night they went missing, Mackenzie caught her sisters sneaking out to go to a party with Jared. At some point, they left the party. When questioned by the police, though, Jared lied because his parents had supplied the alcohol and all the party-goers were underage. Then, he convinced Mackenzie to lie, too. Somehow after all that, the two started dating.
On one of their coffee house stakeouts, Jared shows up with his fiancé. He's clearly surprised to see Mackenzie there, and she realizes that he couldn't have written the letter. Later in the story, after Mackenzie and her parents learn about the arrest, she runs into Jared again, this time at a live music venue. He's drunk and obnoxious and says some pretty vile things about her sisters' murders, and Mackenzie ends up punching him in the face.
Larry
A good bit of the story is told from Larry's point of view. Larry is in his mid-40s and works as a janitor at the local art gallery, but he hopes to be able to quit that job soon and start writing professional music reviews. In fact, he discovers that Mackenzie writes for one of his favorite punk magazines under the pen name Kate Weiss.
When a bomb threat is called in to the art gallery where he works, Larry becomes a suspect. The police traced the call back to the house he's renting out. When they learn that he doesn't actually live there, Larry is cleared, but now his three tenants are under investigation.
Throughout the book, Larry's tenants, especially Maude, call him numerous times about the attic. Under the stipulations of the will, Larry isn't allowed to go into the attic. Plus, it's locked and he doesn't have a key. He's scared to tell his tenants this, however, along with the fact that there are ghosts up there.
The Ghosts in the Attic
Yes, this is an important part in the story, as ridiculous as it sounds.
After many nights of loud thumping, wailing, and even some screaming, Sunna has had enough with the ghosts in the attic and calls the police. The first time she does, they find nothing but a small, empty space above Maude's apartment.
However, the sounds don't go away. Things keep disappearing from the women's apartments, stuff is getting moved around, and condolence flowers mysteriously show up in Mackenzie's apartment after she learns about her sisters' killer being arrested. So the women decide to investigate again. Sunna is kind of like the leader of their trio, so she goes up into the attic and discovers that the ceiling is hinged and will open. What she finds is another completely furnished apartment that Larry clearly has no knowledge of, and she can see multiple pairs of feet. Sufficiently freaked out, she calls the police again.
The first set of officers that arrive, though, are there to see Maude. Turns out, she's a suspect in the bomb threats that have been happening all around the city. There have been sixteen total! They even have a surveillance photo of someone who looks remarkably like Maude; the suspect is even wearing Maude's missing hat. Then another pair of officers arrives, this time in response to Sunna's call. The women manage to convince the officers to investigate the attic before questioning Maude, and what they discover is so bizarre.
Turns out, five people have been living in the attic of this house for years. Larry's Uncle Garnett was the first to move in. He faked his death decades ago because the art gallery wouldn't give him an exhibit. He and his wife, the aunt from whom Larry inherited the house, thought that if he died, she would be able to sell his paintings for a lot of money. It didn't work, and Garnett stayed "dead."
Then one of Garnett's friends, a notorious bank robber, moved in and brought his wife, then another buddy from the U.S. moved in, and finally Larry's Uncle Rebecca faked her death and moved in. The five of them had cooked up a scheme to tunnel into the art gallery and put Garnett's paintings on display in an empty gallery. Then one of Larry's cousin was supposed to sell the paintings left to him in Aunt Rebecca's will and split the profits with them so they could retire somewhere.
The Letter
Of course we can't forget about the letter since so much of the book is spent with Maude, Sunna, and Mackenzie sitting at the coffee shop waiting for the mysterious sender to show up for one of them.
Turns out, the letter wasn't meant for one of them at all. It was meant for Larry of all people. At the beginning of the book, just after he's learned that he has inherited this house that he can't live in, Larry stops at his favorite store to buy some potato wedges. While he's in there, a girl comes in who he thinks is just perfect, but in true bumbling Larry fashion, he bumbles the conversation when he asks for her number. The girl laughs in response and Larry leaves embarrassed.
When Maude, Sunna, and Mackenzie go to the coffee house the very first time, Sunna notices a girl outside one of the neighboring businesses. That's Nikki, the girl from the store that laughed when Larry asked for her number.
At the end of the book, when Maude and Richard are getting married, they have an unexpected guest. It's Nikki looking for Larry. Come to find out, she wasn't laughing at Larry when he asked for her number; she's just as awkward as he is and didn't know how to respond. Then he left before she could explain. She remembered what he said about inheriting a house, wrote a note, and dropped it in the mailbox. Never having seen or heard from him, she decided to ring the doorbell this time.
***End Spoilers***
Alright, so here are my final thoughts.
This story meanders in and out of viewpoints, and I kept finding myself wondering what exactly was going on. Now that I've finished it, I realize that was by design and absolutely vital to how the story unfolds.
The only complaint I keep falling back on is that the point of view that the book is written in is inconsistent, but I really feel like it's something I noticed because of what I teach. Anyway, the book is 98% told in third person limited. Each chapter, while having amusing titles, is labeled based on the character you're getting that particular part of the story from, but there are several instances where the author slips into third person omniscient for a single paragraph, bringing in the thoughts of a different character. It doesn't take away from the story at all; it was just something that irked my nerves a bit, and I try to be as honest as possible in these reviews.
I felt like Sunna's storyline wasn't fully resolved. She doesn't get any closure over the ending of this really long friendship, and that made me kind of sad. I also think, however, it might have been the point? Not all situations in life come with closure, especially the ending of friendships.
Mackenzie's part of the story was by far the most interesting to me. I like that her story ended on a hopeful note with Grant. After a life of so much sadness and guilt and regret, I think she deserves a happy ending.
Maude was just a sad creature for most of the story, which says a lot to me about the human need for connection. I think she latched onto Sunna and Mackenzie in such a harsh way because she was preparing for them to leave her, too.
So lots of lessons to be learned in the pages of this one...and in such a wild ride. A review from another author calls it "quirky," and I absolutely agree. I think this is a book that definitely won't be for everyone because of that quirkiness and kind of niche wit, but it is one that I would encourage you to give a try.
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