The Lost Girls
I am the last. Since Lilith's passing three years ago, the story of that summer has been mine alone, to keep or share. It's a power I've had just once before, and I find I am far less certain now than I was then. I hold secrets that don't belong to me; secrets that would blacken the names of the defenseless dead. Better to let it be, I tell myself. But this notebook reminds me it's not so simple as that. I owe other debts. I made other promises. And not all the defenseless dead, loved or not, are virtuous.
The Lost Girls was pressed into my hands by someone who assured me “We will have lots to talk about” after I read it, and I always find that to be an awkward situation: I love getting book recommendations, usually follow up on them, but rue giving an honest reaction when these recommendations turn out to be just okay. And this book is just okay: Written in two alternating viewpoints – that of an old woman recording her family's secret history and that of her grand-niece; a young single mother who is living with the aftereffects of these secrets – I could see what author Heather Young was trying to achieve (exposing how negative family dynamics are self-perpetuating throughout the generations; how the spotlight of truth may expose an unseen rot), and Young used textbook technique to draw out the dramatic tension of a lost child's story to a big reveal of a climax, and it was all just fine. The most intriguing thing about this book, to me, is wondering what my friend might think “we have to talk about”.
I realize I'm writing to a nine-year-old girl who lives only in my memory. I have no idea who you've grown up to be, Justine, and sometimes, I confess, I hope you won't read this. Lilith would say that an old woman's secrets should be allowed to sink beyond the reach of recollection, and maybe she's right. Still, I will keep writing. There is no harm in the writing. It is only in the reading that the damage will be done. Even then, what will it matter? I will be dead, along with anyone else the truth would hurt.
Lucy Evans, nearing the end of her life, decides to record the secret events of the summer of 1935; the year her younger sister, Emily, went missing in the woods at their Minnesota lake house. Along the way, Lucy narrates everything that came after that summer – how she, her sister Lilith, and their mother all lived together for the rest of their lives at the lake house; how Lilith's daughter, Maurie, was raised there; how Maurie ran away as soon as she was able, only bringing her daughter, Justine, back to the lake to visit her family once. Alternating with this narrative is that of Justine herself: After her lowlife husband abandoned her with two young daughters, Justine fell into a toxic relationship with a clingy and manipulative man. When Justine learns that her great-aunt Lucy has died and left her the family home on a Minnesota lake that she remembers fondly, she packs up the girls and makes a stealthy escape – the same thing her own mother did to Justine repeatedly as she was growing up; something Justine swore she never do to her own kids. The two narratives eventually meet and it becomes apparent how the events of 1935 coloured everything that came after; how five generations of Evans women all became lost girls in their own ways.
Please, remember her. Remember all of us. We are the ghosts of lives stolen, and lives never lived. Once we were heavy, but now we are light. I promise we will not burden you.
Some strange things happen in this book, and I could nitpick the plot and the characters, but my biggest complaint has to do with the actual writing, and specifically, the word choices: I don't think that Heather Young actually understood the meanings of all the words she used and I don't know how that wasn't caught in the editing process. For example, at one point it says, “The glassine calm in Justine's mind shattered in to a million pieces.” According to Dictionary.com, “glassine” is, “A strong, thin, glazed, semitransparent paper, often made into small bags, used for packaging foods, for book jackets, etc.” Is that really what Young meant? Or did she think that “glassine” meant “glass-like” (which it does not, even as a metaphor.) Further, a boat doesn't “ford” the water over the deepest part of the lake, anger cannot be “limned” with astonishment, and the cold is never raw and “toothsome”. This was persistent and too distracting to ignore – I cannot rate higher than two stars and nothing else I could say about this book would matter.
