Ready to discover another great book for this 2021? Take a look…

The Lost Girls by Heather Young

Genre: Psychological Thriller
Source: Random Things Tours
Rating: 4/5
Publisher: Verve Books
Amazon, Hive

About The Book

In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family’s vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her disappearance destroys the family – her father commits suicide, and her mother and two older sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil for the lost child. Sixty years later, Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she writes the story of that devastating summer in a notebook that she leaves, along with the house, to the only person who might care: her grandniece, Justine. For Justine, the lake house offers freedom and stability – a way to escape her manipulative boyfriend and give her daughters the home she never had. But the long Minnesota winter is just beginning. The house is cold and dilapidated. The dark, silent lake is isolated and eerie. Her only neighbor is a strange old man who seems to know more about the summer of 1935 than he’s telling.
Soon Justine’s troubled oldest daughter becomes obsessed with Emily’s disappearance, her mother arrives to steal her inheritance, and the man she left launches a dangerous plan to get her back. In a house haunted by 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

This is a book of tragedy and how generation after generation everything seems related to the past, the moment in which a young girl vanished in the summer of 1935 during a vacation at their lake house family.
This is a story told between two times, 1935, when the young 6-year old Emily disappears, the little one of the family. And then we have Justine, she will inherit the lake house, from her great aunt Lucy, one of Emily’s sister. Now, after so many years, Justine will have to re-open this old family wound and let the truth be revealed, because her life, even without knowing it, is connected to the past events and maybe will change her future.
Even if the plot seems quite difficult, it’s easy to follow and understand the family connection, and sadly seems that fate is ready to repeat again… I don’t want to make spoilers but the past and the present don’t seem to be so different for these women, they all seem to follow the same path, let’s hope that Justine will see how to face her reality with fresh eyes after discovering the truth.
Even if this book is slow paced I really enjoyed the read, it was easy to enter to this family live. It was really interesting to see how the author created some parallel situation between the past and the present; how sometimes we follow the same path of our ancestors, the same errors without noticing or wanting.
Are you ready for “The Lost Girls”?

---

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.