I had my eye on White Fox for awhile before finally purchasing it. It sounds exactly like the kind of novel that I would eat up: a mystery about two sisters whose famous actor mother, Mireille Foix, disappeared a decade earlier, they discover their mother’s long-lost screenplay, White Fox, that she was working on when she disappeared, and it may hold clues to what really happened to her. I devoured this novel in two days, not able to put it down until I knew what happened to Mireille Foix. I found this novel very interesting to read because of the way it is structured, but I think the whole mystery behind the mother’s disappearance was a bit too simplistic in the end.

White Fox is a YA novel, which I did not realize when I bought it, not that there is anything wrong with YA. If you have read my other reviews, you know by now that I read a lot of YA. The sisters, Manon and Thaïs, are eighteen and seventeen respectively. I must be out of touch with reality, because they do not seem like teenagers to me. I think this novel would have worked better if they had been at least a few years older. I think their struggles in this novel would be more impactful if they were adults and still trying to deal with the loss of their mother while messing up their own adult lives.

Manon and Thaïs are at loose ends since their mother disappeared and their father, the founder of a pharmaceutical giant, sent them away from their home after their mother disappeared to live with their aunt in New York. They are somewhat estranged from each other because of their opposing temperaments and their opposing views. Manon is reserved, awkward, studious and wants to be a writer; she plans to write a book about the “real” Mireille Foix. Thaïs, on the other hand, plans on dropping out of high school, is a fashionable social media darling and beloved by everyone she meets; but she is mostly a facade. Manon believes that it is likely their mother disappeared to commit suicide while Thaïs believes that their mother ran away for another reason and that she is still alive.

When the novel begins, Manon and Thaïs’ father has recently died, and they return to the (fictional) Mediterranean island called Viloxin where they were born in order to attend a retrospective of Mireille Foix’s work. They also use this opportunity to find out if their mother really is still alive after they come across the White Fox screenplay, which mysteriously turns up in their abandoned childhood home.

I appreciate the narrative structure of the novel, which is told from the alternating perspectives of Manon and Thaïs, so the reader is given the opportunity to know how both characters think and to sympathize with each of them, and a mysterious third narrator simply called “Boy” who seems obsessed with Mireille Foix (and by extension, her daughters), but also includes the entire long-lost White Fox screenplay written by Mireille Foix, told in five parts. I love the whole story within a story concept. Each part of the screenplay is dropped into the novel at just the right time to provide another clue about Mireille Foix’s life while Manon and Thaïs work towards solving the mystery of her disappearance.

The White Fox screenplay within the novel is a strange fairy tale that I think requires some rereading in order to fully appreciate the clues buried inside it and how these clues relate to the information the sisters uncover about their mother from conversations they have with Mireille Foix’s acquaintances. I recommend this book for its narrative structure alone, even if the overall mystery turns out to be kind of weak in the end.