How To Be Lost

Rating:
Summary: How To Be Lost a must-read
Review: by Joni M. Wallace, author of Redshift.

I anxiously awaited Amanda Eyre Ward's second novel afer reading the award-winning Sleep Toward Heaven. How To Be Lost does not disappoint. Ward's lucid prose, and her story, illuminate our most interior landscapes - grief, longing, and ultimately, how we are found. Ward's is an enormously talented voice - funny, unblinking, and sage. She will make you laugh as surely as she will break your heart. How To Be Lost is a memorable accomplishment.

Rating:
Summary: Adequate without ever stretching the reader...
Review: How To Be Lost is by no means a bad book. Competently written and well-paced it fills a few hours perfectly well but is not a novel I have thought much about since completing it and certainly not one I would foist upon other readers.

Ward sets up a good plot and follows it through effectively. Her literary style, however, is fairly anonymous; there is nothing in the writing itself to admire or rave about.

Where she rises above the average is in characterisation. All of the characters who populate her novel are believable and realistic, you can imagine them having lives outside of these pages.

I suspect the book will have more resonance with a female readership (that is not me being sexist or patronising, I just believe a female reader may empathise more to the main characters and story) and may appeal to fans of Lovely Bones, although it lacks the emotional impact of that book.

Ward is an author to watch and, if she can develop a more personal style in later books, may well be someone I return to in a few novels time.

Rating:
Summary: Lost in a great book
Review: I have read many fabulous books this year such as "Plainsong","Evertide","The Girl with a Pearl Earring", and after reading these books I thought I will never be able to find another book as good. Well, along came "How to Be Lost" and I found myself completely engrossed from page 1. I'm not going to repeat the storyline since other reviewers have done that already. The characters were believable and were easy to relate to. I couldn't put it down and was sad when it was over because I enjoyed it so much and didn't want it to end. Great book, highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Read it, then read it again!
Review: I just finished Ward's book for the second time- even though I already knew the ending, it was incredibly gripping. The characters unfold, come together, drift apart...creating a story that will keep you hooked. Ward's humor comes through in the honest narration of Caroline Winters and the relationships between the sisters are complex and beautiful. It's another emotional ride with Amanda Eyre Ward- one that is very much worth taking.

Rating:
Summary: Very good indeed
Review: I recommend this book highly. It seemed to me to start a little slowly, but then it built credibly, such that before I knew it, I was completely engrossed. Ward uses this same clever approach throughout, introducing characters and story details in a sinuous manner, continuously circling her central theme of personal discovery, while developing layers and nuances in the story that make it a rich and rewarding read. Ward deserves particular credit for developing her characters' voices so distinctly and convincingly. I found myself eagerly chasing the threads of fist Caroline's, then Agnes', then Isabelle's and Bernard's story, and realizing in pulses how they would eventually be related.

Another reviewer has said she "guessed the story ending way too early." I guess I'd say that, for me, guessing the ending wasn't what made the story interesting and exciting: it was the story itself, and how it evolved.

Finally, for what it's worth, I enjoyed How To Be Lost more than Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and Donna Tartt's The Secret Friend, two other recent books with similar storylines to which How to Be Lost is bound to be compared. I found ...Lost to have a more deft balance between wry humour, sentimentality, and sensibility than either of the others, which seemed to lose focus (especially The Secret Friend), or rely too strongly on a precious (for lack of a better word) literary conceit (Lovely Bones).

Rating:
Summary: a delicately balanced book about domestic horror ...
Review: Reviewed by John A. Mangarella for Small Spiral Notebook

A death in the family can be shattering, ripping hearts and creating tears for months afterward. Eventually, the closure of knowing a loved one is dead, where they are buried, the carving on their tombstone and the spoken memories that accompany each holiday slowly return life to normalcy. When a child goes missing and there is no sign of life or death or anything except a silence manufactured in Hell, it creates a monster that haunts a family, feeding on their love, drowning their emotions, causing them to look and search in places they have looked and searched so many times before. This haze befalls the Winters family in Amanda Eyre Ward's How To Be Lost, a novel that will share a bookshelf with Alice Sebold's renowned, The Lovely Bones.

The Winters sisters, fourteen year old Caroline, thirteen year old Madeline, and Ellie a bright, bubbly five year old, possess a bond that is tightened on a daily basis by the emotional slaughterhouse of their parent's marriage. Joseph is a failing businessman who manages to give them a prestigious lifestyle despite his uncontrollable anger. Isabelle, his wife, tries desperately to be mother to her three daughters but is really much too busy being Joseph's target. The girls are alone within the walls of their huge house, a place where arguments echo and the girls cringe in the aftershock of a brutal marriage.

When Caroline accepts a date with young Jim O'Hara, Madeline and Ellie are excited and help her prepare for this momentous night. Jim is abruptly turned away at the door by Joseph, Caroline promptly rebels and is beaten by her father as her mother and sisters watch, too frightened to intercede. The sisters decide to pool their baby sitting money, steal the family Oldsmobile and run away from home. They take their time, carefully studying a Rand McNally Atlas and planning their escape. They decide on New Orleans after watching a rerun of "A Street Car Named Desire". Anything to get away from home. Away from their drunken, savage father and their weary and beaten mother.

The girls make their escape on the last day of school. Caroline steals the Oldsmobile, picks up Madeline and they drive over to the elementary school where Ellie is supposed to meet them. Ellie isn't there. They ride through the streets looking for her but she's nowhere to be found. Madeline confesses to having an argument with Ellie so they head home, thinking their little sister has backed out of the plan. She's not at home. She is missing. And she stays missing, tearing the Winters family apart. Caroline, Madeline and Isabelle each blame themselves for Ellie's disappearance. It's a blame that emerges from some dark region that consumes the goodness from their days.

Fifteen years later, Caroline is a cocktail waitress in New Orleans, Madeline has married and stayed in New York and Isabelle, their aging mother, remains in her condo, still searching for Ellie. They've searched for Ellie every day of their lives and have only found a deep hurt that, as Caroline puts it, shows them how to be lost. Caroline returns home for Christmas with her mom and sister, always a painful holiday because Ellie's ghost lives in the background. This Christmas is different because Isabelle shows Caroline a copy of People Magazine containing a photo of a grown up Ellie at rodeo in Montana. Caroline quits New Orleans, packs her car and heads for Montana hoping to locate Ellie. Hoping to learn if the girl in the picture is really her lost younger sister.

Amanda Eyre Ward has written a delicately balanced book about the domestic horror and emotional battling that tears people apart inside. She also brings the strength of each character, Caroline, Madeline, Isabelle, Ellie, into every page. This delicacy is not a simple choice for a writer to make because it truly balances How To Be Lost in a manner that very few books achieve. This is not simply a tale about a missing girl. This is a parable about how a family can be lost from each other while searching for the one who is gone, the one who can cement them back together again. Anyone who reads Amanda Eyre Ward's How To Be Lost, will eagerly await her next book.



Rating:
Summary: A Lovely Book
Review: Terrific, and lovely, and lumpy in the places a book should be lumpy.

I was surprised by my surprise, and full of the soft meanderings found within. Left me feeling ready for something else, something else new, something else at least this good.

Rating:
Summary: Drinking a Cold Bottle of Water in One Pull
Review: Thank God for How to Be Lost, by Amanda Eyre Ward. I've just spent a too-long jag of trying to remember why, exactly, I liked reading novels, when along came this one, and though I had my questions and doubts in the first couple and a half chapters, the plot lines did a nice double-back, and my assumptions shattered. I did find myself, after having spent two thirds of the novel in New Orleans and New York, wishing that we'd spent the majority of our time in Missoula (where the final third or so resides, and where the prose is sharpest, leanest, most enviable), but frankly I like it a bit loose, where I can't really pin down either plot or style or anything else, for that matter. The novel that sets out for uniformity of voice ends up with just that, and I tend to find that tiresome. This? This is good. It picks me up when it needs to and drops me from the top of the stairs when it needs to do that. Reading How to Be Lost was a bit like drinking a cold bottle of water in one long pull. It's cleansing. And it makes me feel like a reader again. And, not-too-incidentally, a writer as well. And finally, thankful, for having read it.

Rating:
Summary: An amazing second novel!
Review: The sophomore novel is tough for any author, but Amanda Eyre Ward pulls it off with an elegant finesse. How To Be Lost is is a gripping, emotional novel. The characters are drawn with crystal clarity and heartrending truthfulness. In the novel, the family's already dysfunctional world is shattered when their youngest child is abducted. Instead of showing us the immediate shockwaves this event would cause, Ms. Ward fast-forwards us to the older siblings' adulthoods, creating a much more dramatic contrast to their earlier innocence. Ellie's disappearance continues to resonate throughout their lives, even twenty years later. Watching them continue to grapple with living with a sibling who is suddenly gone, and then decide to take on the search for her is so absorbing that I found myself picking up the book when I had only five or ten minutes to read, just because I HAD to know what was happening next.

Reading Ms. Ward's characterizations is like taking a masters' course in creative writing. Agnes, especially, in this novel treads a razor-thin line between silliness and despair. Her letters to an "Alaskan Hunk" from a personal's ad give us glimpses of her naivete and sexy hopefulness. I love how the author makes use of her rich dark humor to underscore even the most poignant scenes, much as she did in her first novel.

It's so difficult to end a novel about an abduction without doing the happy Hollywood-style ending or forcing the characters to come to grips with their worst fears. Withough giving anything away, I feel that this book creates the most realistic feeling balance I've read yet. You are left feeling the conflict is resolved but with just enough questions that you want more... perhaps a sequel??

Rating:
Summary: Could not put it down
Review: This is a read in one sitting kind of book. I loved how the story unfolded and how what seemed to be different storylines tied together. I also liked the different settings of New Orleans, suburban New York, and Montana. The characters were compelling and there were surprising twists in the plot.