Random Things Tours - The Lost Girls

 

TITLE: The Lost Girls

AUTHOR: Heather Young

PUBLISHER: Verve Books

PUBLISHING DATE: 2021

PAGES: 341

SOURCE: ARC

FROM GOODREADS: 

In the summer of 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family’s vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her disappearance destroys her mother, who spends the rest of her life at the lake house, hoping in vain that her favorite daughter will walk out of the woods. Emily’s two older sisters stay, too, each keeping her own private, decades-long vigil for the lost child. 

Sixty years later Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before she dies, she writes the story of that devastating summer in a notebook that she leaves, along with the house, to the only person to whom it might matter: her grandniece, Justine. 

For Justine, the lake house offers a chance to escape her manipulative boyfriend and give her daughters the stable home she never had. But it’s not the sanctuary she hoped for. The long Minnesota winter has begun. The house is cold and dilapidated, the frozen lake is silent and forbidding, and her only neighbor is a strange old man who seems to know more than he’s telling about the summer of 1935. 

Soon Justine’s troubled oldest daughter becomes obsessed with Emily’s disappearance, her mother arrives with designs on her inheritance, and the man she left behind launches a dangerous plan to get her back. In a house steeped in the sorrows of the women who came before her, Justine must overcome their tragic legacy if she hopes to save herself and her children.

MY THOUGHTS:  The Lost Girls is a perfect novel to get wrapped up in a joyfully read the day away.  I read it in a short amount of time because I had to see where the story ended.  Justine inherits a lake house from her great aunt.  She takes her children and moves there there hoping to escape her current predicament.  Soon, her youngest daughter becomes obsessed with learning all she can about a disappearance of a young relative years and years ago.  

This book incorporates current day (1999) with the past, which is told through a notebook written 60 years ago.  I really felt badly for the women in this family and in fact, all of them, in some ways, were also lost.  The book is relatively slow-paced but the story is strong and the setting of the dilapidated old lake house becomes a character of its own.  

If you love slow burn novels and endings that pack a punch, then this is the book for you.  It's a wonderful way to spend a rainy weekend as its the perfect backdrop for an entertaining tale about generations of women I won't likely forget anytime soon.

RATING: 4 PAWS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: HEATHER YOUNG is the author of two novels. Her debut, The Lost Girls, won the Strand Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for an Edgar Award. The Distant Dead has also been nominated for the 2021 Edgar Award for Best Novel. A former antitrust and intellectual property litigator, she traded the legal world for the literary one and earned her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2011. She lives in Mill Valley, California, where she writes, bikes, hikes, and reads books by other people that she wishes she’d written.