How to Be Lost

written by Amanda Eyre Ward

This is perhaps the first time since high school that I've read an entire novel in under 24 hours. But I guess anyone could pull that off if trapped on a tour bus for most of a day. I brought this book along on the one-day Grand Canyon excursion that Janet and I signed up for while we were in Las Vegas for a few days. (The heck with Girls' Night Out — how about a Girls' Weekend Out!) Since the drive time between Vegas and the Grand Canyon is a staggering 4.5 hours across a barren desert, this book is what prevented me from going catatonic while listening to the torturously bad jokes of the tour bus driver.

I'd first heard of this novel from Cindy, who read it during our backpacking trip through Great Smoky Mountain National Park last spring. I remember her being both engrossed in this book and shocked by some of its twists. It sounded to me like a good "chick" book.

It's about a girl named Caroline Winters whose younger sister Ellie vanishes at age 5. The family basically falls apart in the ensuing years. Much later, when Caroline's an adult, her mother shows her a page out of a magazine, and in the background is a woman who the mom thinks is the missing sister. Caroline ends up going on a quest to Montana to find the woman.

Of note:

• The style of this book is very Jodi-Picoult-ish, which Janet and I decided is a pretty common theme lately in new novels. You get a fairly close and disturbing look at a dysfunctional family with many layers of problems, and there's not a necessarily tidy ending. You also get to see things from multiple people's perspectives, which I always find kind of cool.
• There are some wandering side plots that go nowhere. (The following might be a spoiler if you plan to read this book.) A major example is when Caroline finds the woman she thinks is Ellie but it ends up being someone who just looks a little like Ellie. The mistaken identity becomes obvious to the reader pretty early on, yet the story lingers way too long on this. Other annoying tangents that take up too much of the reader's time include the premature birth of Caroline's niece, her (other) sister's rocky marriage, and the sudden death of Caroline's mother.
• The ending was abrupt and lame. Definitely a lot of unfinished business and loose ends. I got the feeling that the author's publishing deadline was looming or something, and she just stopped writing.
• I loved the character of Agnes Fowler and the way the author revealed her personality through letters. I'm a bit embarrassed to say that Agnes reminds me a little of myself. Trusting, naive, very un-savvy in many ways, yet fairly competent in other ways. For the record, though, I must clarify here that, unlike Agnes, I have never visited a website called AlaskaHunks.com.