Such Quiet Girls

Sage and her sister board Bus 315 after school, as they do every day, and never arrive home. The driver, Jessa, is on one of her first runs. Ten children are meant to reach daycare, and none of them gets there.

All of them wake in a shipping container buried twenty feet underground. Jessa blames herself for what has happened, much as she still blames herself for something that happened to her own daughter three years earlier. Above ground, a school bus taken in daylight becomes the only story anyone is telling.

The book stays largely within the container, so the setting is cramped and the pressure keeps building. Jessa tries to keep a group of frightened children together, and she tries to work out what the people who took them actually want. The air is running out. Part of the question she faces is whether any kind of waiting can end well.

This suspense novel has a closed-room feel and is told from inside the captivity rather than from the search above it. It draws on real events. Expect a tense, claustrophobic read with children at its center.