Renate Wildermuth’s wonderful new novel begins with precocious narrator Talya telling us of her last year of high school: “I had about 6,936 hours to go until I graduated from high school; if you don’t want to do the math, it was the first day of my senior year. It was a miserable day.” Talya has both the voice of an adolescent and the irony of an adult. About her English teacher, she tells us, “Ebert was trying to explain to us what a cliche was. It was like pulling teeth.”

Into that boring English class walks Axel: “Then the new student walked in fifty-three minutes and twenty seconds late. He did to the class what the lightning was doing to the sky: he made it come alive.” And so the reader might expect another predictable story of young love.

But “Gone” is very different. Talya’s story, which includes the loss of her parents in a carjacking and being raised by her uncle, who might be a spy, is not reported via adolescent diary entries. This is a thriller, full of twists and told through redacted confessions gathered by a government agency. The agent asks Talya, “They want your story of how the homecoming game became an international incident.”

This layered story can confuse. Talya sometimes describes what she sees in her own reflection. The redacted confessions and interrogations by the government echo her musings in the classroom — “A rhetorical question isn’t a question at all. It’s a statement masquerading as a question. An answer is not expected and never given. When were the teachers going to realize that all questions in this school were rhetorical?”

Talya remains a bit of a mystery, a troubled high school student searching for answers about herself, our world. At the end, Axel, who brightened Mr. Ebert’s English class, taught a more mature Talya “how to open my heart again. Taught me how much that hurts.”

The high school setting and the adolescent narrator suggest this is a Young Adult novel, and young adults will certainly enjoy it and identify with the student characters (and maybe the suggestion that high school is a prison). But the layers, the stories within stories — the history a wounded civics teacher embodies, e.g. — appeals also to adult readers. Renate Wildermuth has contributed to local outlets such as NCPR and Adirondack Life and taught in the North Country, and her “Gone Before You Knew Me” has a broad audience.