I’m willing to bet Amanda Eyre Ward is a fan of fairy tales—the kind where children are snatched away by shadowy figures, quests embarked upon by unlikely heroes come to happy fruition, and families, in all their messy love and loathing, understand not only how to be lost, but how to be found. In this, Ward’s second novel, our heroine is a booze-soaked thirty-two-year-old cocktail waitress who works at the rotating bar at the top of the New Orleans World Trade Center and eats “hot dogs by choice.”

As children, Caroline and her two sisters, Madeline and Ellie, devise a plan to escape from their overbearing father and ineffectual mother (both ever-arguing alcoholics). The plan backfires when Caroline goes to pick up Ellie, the youngest, at school, and discovers she has disappeared. Years later, Caroline encounters a photograph in People magazine of a rodeo in Montana. Her mother is convinced that the blurred girl in the portrait is the now-adult Ellie. Caroline resolves to follow this “lead” to Montana, to settle once and for all the question of her sister’s disappearance.

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—Heather Birrell