Shanarie Ramdin is sixteen, Trinidadian, and living in Houston. She is fast, sassy, and tired of being treated like a child. Her friends swear nobody gets taken in their neighborhood. Her father, Farrie, keeps making her put the phone down in parking lots and look at the world like it can lie. She thinks he is extra.
Then a door locks.
What follows is not a mystery the reader solves first. Shanarie has to remember every warning she laughed at if she wants to get home. They Said Not Here is an intense, heartfelt novel about a girl who treated safety like a joke until it was too late - and about the girls and women in real life who never got the ending this story gives her.
This is fiction. The girls who never come home are not.