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How to Be Lost

by Amanda Eyre Ward

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1,0233719,975 (3.54)38
Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. HTML:

From the author of the celebrated Sleep Toward Heaven comes a novel of love and secrets. To their neighbors in suburban Holt, New York, the Winters family has it all: a grand home, a trio of radiant daughters, and a sense that they are safe in their affluent corner of America. But when five-year-old Ellie disappears, the fault lines within the Winters family are exposed. Joseph, once a successful businessman, succumbs to his demons. Isabelle retreats into memories of her debutante days in Savannah, Georgia. And Ellie's bereft sisters grow apart: Madeline reluctantly stays home, while Caroline runs away. Fifteen years later, Caroline, now a New Orleans cocktail waitress, sees a photograph of a woman in People Magazine. Convinced that it is Ellie all grown up, Caroline embarks on a search for her missing sister, armed with Xerox copies of the photograph, an amateur detective guide, and a cooler of Dixie beer. As Caroline travels through the New Mexico desert, the mountains of Colorado, and the smoky underworld of Montana, she devotes herself to salvaging her broken family. With dark humor and gorgeous prose, Amanda Eyre Ward brings us a spellbinding novel about the stories we are given, and the stories we embrace.

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» See also 38 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 37 (next | show all)
I wouldn't say I loved this book, but I did like it well enough. (Too few books manage to hold my attention these days.)

The story fell just a little bit short of what I'd hoped for in terms of the final resolution of the central mystery....and I saw where it was headed far too many pages ahead of it actually getting there.

Still, it was mostly well written and original enough that I'd like to see what else Amanda Ward has written. ( )
  Kim.Sasso | Aug 27, 2023 |
This book has interesting characters and settings. The author did a masterful job of leading in you in one direction and then surprising you the reader with the opening of the next chapter. Yet it unfolds in a realistic manner. ( )
  Thomas.Cannon | Dec 7, 2021 |
not worth going beyond sample-reading
  lulaa | Sep 2, 2019 |
I wouldn't say I loved this book, but I did like it well enough. (Too few books manage to hold my attention these days.)

The story fell just a little bit short of what I'd hoped for in terms of the final resolution of the central mystery....and I saw where it was headed far too many pages ahead of it actually getting there.

Still, it was mostly well written and original enough that I'd like to see what else Amanda Ward has written. ( )
  Kim_Sasso | Mar 14, 2018 |
(26) This was a quickly read novel about a family whose 5 year old daughter goes missing. We catch up to the family when the two other sisters are adults and their lives are damaged in predictable ways. Our protagonist, once a promising young pianist, is now a cocktail waitress in New Orleans. She returns home, age 30-something, for Christmas and events transpire to compel her to begin a search for her sister anew.

The novel is told in a series of flashbacks; which at first are pawned off as the daughter dreaming of the mother's young life - but then it just morphs into a second storyline told by a third person narrator, interspersed with a series of letters from a young woman writing to a strange man from a dating service. It all sounds mysterious, but actually, it was fairly easy to piece together and it seemed formulaic and predictable.

It was a quickly read airplane/beach read but not much beyond that. Old 'cold case' stories usually grab me, but this was just not particularly convincingly written. But entertaining and enjoyable in a light way despite the subject matter. ( )
  jhowell | Jun 20, 2016 |
Showing 1-5 of 37 (next | show all)
In this, Ward’s second novel, our heroine is a booze-soaked thirty-two-year-old cocktail waitress who works at the rotating bar at the top of the New Orleans World Trade Center and eats “hot dogs by choice.”
 
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For Mary-Anne Westley, my mother and guiding star
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The afternoon before, I planned how I would tell her.
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Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. HTML:

From the author of the celebrated Sleep Toward Heaven comes a novel of love and secrets. To their neighbors in suburban Holt, New York, the Winters family has it all: a grand home, a trio of radiant daughters, and a sense that they are safe in their affluent corner of America. But when five-year-old Ellie disappears, the fault lines within the Winters family are exposed. Joseph, once a successful businessman, succumbs to his demons. Isabelle retreats into memories of her debutante days in Savannah, Georgia. And Ellie's bereft sisters grow apart: Madeline reluctantly stays home, while Caroline runs away. Fifteen years later, Caroline, now a New Orleans cocktail waitress, sees a photograph of a woman in People Magazine. Convinced that it is Ellie all grown up, Caroline embarks on a search for her missing sister, armed with Xerox copies of the photograph, an amateur detective guide, and a cooler of Dixie beer. As Caroline travels through the New Mexico desert, the mountains of Colorado, and the smoky underworld of Montana, she devotes herself to salvaging her broken family. With dark humor and gorgeous prose, Amanda Eyre Ward brings us a spellbinding novel about the stories we are given, and the stories we embrace.

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Joseph and Isabelle Winters seem to have it all: a grand home in Holt, NY, a trio of radiant daughters, and a sense that they are safe in their affluent corner of America. But when five-year-old Ellie disappears, the fault lines within the family are exposed: Joseph, once a successful businessman, succumbs to his demons; Isabelle retreats into memories of her debutante days in Savannah; and Ellie's bereft sisters grow apart-Madeline reluctantly stays home, while Caroline runs away. Fifteen years later, Caroline, now a New Orleans cocktail waitress, sees a photograph of a woman in a magazine. Convinced that it is Ellie, all grown up, Caroline embarks on a search for her missing sister. Armed with copies of the photo, an amateur detective guide, and a cooler of Dixie beer, Caroline travels through the New Mexico desertm the mountains of Colorado, and the smoky underworld of Montana, determined to salvage her broken family.
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