Sheridan Hay

After losing her mother on her 18th birthday, Rosemary Savage arrives in 1970s New York with nothing more than $300 and a burning need to find something to fill the void. She winds up at the Arcade, a spralling used bookstore characterized by piles of books, acquisitive customers, and eccentric employees. As Rosemary tries to adjust to life away from her native Tasmania, she finds herself drawn into an intrigue surrounding a lost novel by Herman Melville.

The mystery element of this story show more was the weakest part in my opinion- the storyline was neither compelling nor convincing, and too many unanswered questions remained unanswered at the end of the book. Regardless, the beautiful prose was enough to carry this weak story from start to finish. The portraits of the characters were deftly drawn, and I truly felt the pain of Rosemary's extreme naiveté and her awkward relationships with Oscar and Mr. Geist. The writing is lyrical and dense, a festival for the eyes and brain that called to mind another novel of literary discovery- [book: The Thirteenth Tale]. Though I wish the details of the mystery had been more fully fleshed, I highly recommend this book for the power of the writing alone. show less

One small quibble... One doesn't write "Tasmania" on the customs form. One writes, TAS and the postal code and then AUSTRALIA. Despite Tasmania's cultural independence, they are still part of Australia. Just as when mailing things Hawaii gets reduced to HI.

The review:

Sometimes a book will just click with a reader. Everything (or almost everything) will fall into place and just be a shared experience between the author, the fictional characters and the reader. The Secret of Lost Things by show more Sheridan Hay was one of those books for me.

Rosemary born on Anzac Day and therefore named for the herb often worn on lapels in Australia. Until her eighteenth birthday her home is her mother's hat shop in Tasmania. When her mother dies she is sent by a bookseller friend to New York with her mother's ashes in a box of Huon pine, one of the most pungent pine scents I have ever smelled; it seems to permeate the entire island.

In that first chapter I was drawn back to my own experience as an exchange student in Tasmania at the age of 17. I can picture the very first place I visited on my own, a used book shop in Ulverstone to buy Nova by Samuel R. Delany for $5.20. I was just as naive and confused by Tasmanian culture (which is a blend of mainland Australian and British ex-pat cultures) as Rosemary is in New York. I can remember being overwhelmed by homesickness at the aroma of the Huon pines (which aren't really pines but smell enough like them to confuse a jet-lagged nose) growing at the Don college.

Then there is Rosemary's time in New York where she works at a place called The Arcade (and apparently inspired by the author's time working at the Strand). Although I haven't worked in a bookstore (would love to someday) I have worked in a university library and in my father's antique shop both which attract people similar to the characters in The Secret of Lost Things.

The final point where I clicked with Rosemary was with her involvement in the search for Melville's lost novel, Isle of the Cross (1853). While I'm no Melville scholar, I am a bit of a fan of his and Hawthorne's books and was vaguely aware of their odd friendship.

Had all those different pieces in my life not been in place I probably would have been more troubled by the novel's flaws. The wacky characters are sometimes too two-dimensional, Rosemary stays naive too long, her obsession with Oscar is just as creepy as Geist's obsession with her is. Yes, those flaws are there but the connection I felt with the book was so strong I don't care about any of them. show less

Rosemary has lived all of her eighteen years in a small town in Tasmania. When her mother dies, a family friend sends her off to New York armed with three hundred dollars and her mother's ashes in a small pine box. Rosemary finds a job in an enormous used and rare bookstore where the employees are about as colorful as you could hope to find in the NYC of 1980. Rosemary learns to negotiate relationships, although the man she decides to fall in love with is about as unsuitable as show more possible.

There is a mystery, too. A manuscript, presumed lost, by Herman Melville is hinted at and she, as well as a few others at the bookstore, begin searching for clues to its nature. This book is beautifully written, in a slightly old-fashioned way, reminiscent of The Thirteenth Tale. Rosemary is naive, in the way of a sheltered eighteen-year-old, but she isn't stupid. The book explores Melville's friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and how his career as a writer ended with the publication of Moby Dick. The parts about Melville are eloquent and have me eager to dig into Moby Dick. show less

There's a somewhat recent phrase bandied about the movie review world concerning the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. According to a definition from Wikipedia, this character is a "bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." Well, I think there should be a character type that would cover almost all the primary characters in this work. show more I’ll call the collection of individuals found in this book a Moronic Unbelievable Menagerie of Morons. I wanted to like this book; I really did. However, there were far too many scenes where I wanted to rip the remaining hair out of my head. If I were a fly on one of the Arcade’s walls, I would have flown posthaste into a window or solemnly perched upon Walter Geist's exposed light bulb and found succor in death. In the end, I want no Rosemary for remembrance. I’ve had enough of the Moronic Unbelievable Menagerie of Morons. show less