Book Review 2 of 52: How to Be Lost by Amanda Eyre Ward

I came across this novel when browsing through Hastings. It's a wonderful place to get cheap used books (I think I got three or four books for 9 bucks).

Now my book buying process goes as such. First the cover must be mildly appealing. Especially if it's from a major publisher. If the cover is lackluster it's pretty much a throwaway cover for a throwaway book they're sorry they published and want to let it die a slow and peniless death.

Then again that's not always the case so we'll call the cover 30% of the process.

Next is the author. Some author's I'll never ever read again I don't care what they write (Chuck Palahniuk, David Foster Wallace). Some author's I'll read no matter what (John Dufresne). This would be 20% of the process. I don't rule out unknown names, which is where the third part comes in.

50% of the process is the synopsis. The back cover/inside flap has roughly 2 paragraphs to get my attention. This includes the 2 or 3 review quotes they'll add and I'll immediately disregard. Be wary though, sometimes the synopsis has NOTHING to do with the book which I'll get into in a moment.

First, my brief synopsis of the book: Caroline, Madeline, and Ellie are sisters. When they're young they want to run away but Ellie gets kidnapped and they never find the kidnapper and Ellie never returns. This drive the family apart. The dad's an alcoholic, Caroline runs off to New Orleans, Madeline...well she doesn't really do anything, and their mother Isabelle relentlessly pursues her missing daughter from the comfort of her own couch. She spots a photo that looks like her missing daughter and her kind-of-sort-of dying wish is that Caroline pursue the girl in the photo in the hopes of finding long lost Ellie.

From my count it took 165 pages to get to that point. It took over half of the novel just to set up the damn thing. Now Caroline is the narrator, along with Agnes Flowers who is writing letters to a man she met on AlaskaHunks.com (don't even try it, it's not a real website). There's also Caroline's childhood flashbacks, and flashbacks to when her mother/father were engaged.

Now if you're to believe the reviews it's "A compelling page-turner [that] unfolds as part suspense novel, part memoir...[How to be Lost] chronicles Caroline's tale with vivid eloquence, clarity, and dark nuanced humor." At least that's according to the Boston Globe.

Let's go backwards here. First off, it's not funny. There's no dark humor. There's no humor period. Caroline is not a funny or engaging personality. She drinks a lot, but not to the point of being drunk or letting if affect her life, or having any point other than having her go into bars, ordering a lot of whiskey and not feeling any sort of effect from it.

There's no clarity in this novel either. Is it about Caroline's search for her sister? Is it about the effect Ellie's disappearance had on their family? Is it about her mother's failed engagement to Bernard? Is it about Agnes Flowers laughably bad letters to her AlaskaHunk? Pick one, ditch the others. When the search for her sister finally gets underway after page 165 it takes about 40 pages for it to start and end, rushing through to make it to the "Oh my God everything turned out great!" ending.

We can rule out suspense as well. I'm glad the novel spoon-fed me the mystery before the search for the sister even got underway. Now usually I'll think I have it all figured out and there will be some curveball about two-thirds of the way through that will throw things off in a satisying way. Not this one. Once you have it figured out, that's it. Nothing will change, the novel will stay on its one track, it will make it to the station on time, and everything will go according to plan. It's not suspenseful, it's paint-by-numbers and it got a few of the colors wrong.

Let's just get something out of the way too. If you're going to put sex in a novel, please call it sex. Don't call it "tangling the sheets." Tangling the sheets is what I do when I try to get out of bed in the morning and I'm still half asleep. We're all grown-ups here. Sex is sex. Either be an adult about it or cut it out of your novel.

I do have to agree that the book is a page turner. I did have to physically turn the pages in order to finish the book. Now I wasn't excited to turn the pages and I wasn't biting my nails in anticipation of what lay in store on the next page, I just knew I had 52 books to read and I couldn't give up on one mid-way no matter how bad it turned out.

I'll cut to the chase. Do not read this book. Read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It's pretty much the same premise except it has an actual plot to it that it sticks to and doesn't waver from. Also it has an ending that's actually satisying and doesn't make you feel like you've watched some hastily put together Lifetime movie while hopped up on painkillers.

I will make a promise though. The next time I read a book that has anything remotely close to this within its pages:

'She screamed It's not true! It's not true!' But Bernard knew it was true.

I'm going to throw the book into a fire. Thank you very much for telling me that one of the characters is aware of something that just happened to them. If it wasn't for you I would have never known that the character was aware of something he was actively a part of.