What makes “Wait For Me,” the new YA offering from Sara Shepard, work for a reader like me — a novice reader of YA fiction — is the almost hypnotic construction of a page-turning, just-one-more-chapter-before-I-sleep plot.

The novel begins as if we’re joining Cinderella on her wedding day, an impression quickly broken by an apparent act of violence. And this is only the prologue. The novel proper begins when protagonist Casey Rhodes introduces herself: “I wear many disguises. Minimalist ones, street-cool graffitied ones, and ones you’d find in a steamer trunk, carefully preserved.”

A seventeen-year-old NYU sophomore and scholarship-student from Brooklyn, Casey is getting ready for a private gala at the Met as the unlikely guest of her new über-rich Prince Charming of a boyfriend. But what starts as a Cinderella story comes with a haunting that both sets the action in motion and draws us into other territories — literally as we leave Manhattan for a wintry beach town on Long Island, and figuratively as Casey leaves romance to face mysteries of failed memory and the supernatural.

Sara Shepard is known for plot-twists, and this mastery of the twisty plot is what “Wait For Me” delivers. Casey has a tendency to make quick assumptions based on new information. If at first the leaps seem natural, plausible enough to go unnoticed, as the misdirections accumulate, repeatedly steering her away from truths known and memories buried, it becomes clear that her imagination is protecting her from what her own mind has hidden.

It is especially satisfying that the narrative sleight-of-hand that heightens and advances the suspense depends on this struggle in Casey’s character, and that the struggle itself mirrors the hidden mysteries. These mysteries turn out to be many, and many-layered, and the riveting quality of the book emerges with them — past, present and future, personalities and truths, all superimposed — and with the genre-shifts the uncovering produces, from romance, to supernatural thriller, to psychological thriller, to murder mystery, and more.

Several key characters in “Wait For Me” are implausibly young for their situations. Many have lost a parent at an early age, to be raised singly by a mother, a father or a surrogate. Scions of wealth have stepped up to enormous responsibility before reaching adulthood. (In Shepard’s acknowledgments, she writes that in one of its drafts “Wait For Me” was an adult novel, and I can’t help but wonder how the adult versions of these characters differed.)

While as a narrator Casey presents herself with attitude, and as a character she is said to be a prodigy in multiple languages, literature, music and math, the writing that is her first-person present-tense voice is simple, even bland. The characterization lacks depth in every sense except in the novel’s strategic uncovering of the backstory. That none of this interferes with the pleasure of the ride is one of the accomplishments of the book. From the beginning, almost to the last page, in “Wait For Me,” backstory is what matters most.

As Casey works through each new layer of mystery, the dramatic construction of her discovery of the past itself serves to deliver and simultaneously to erase her character, so completely that from the final discovery on, she is essentially starting over, a clean slate, a blank page, ending with a new hello, an unwritten fresh beginning.

Sara Shepard will be in Pittsburgh on Thursday, February 16, 2023 at 6:00 p.m. More information is available via Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures.

Catherine Gammon is a writer living in Pittsburgh. Her latest book is “The Martyrs, The Lovers.”

First Published: February 12, 2023, 5:00 a.m.