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Summary: Characters that aren't what they seem...
Review: I expected this to be a lovely tale of an adopted daughter finding her birth mother. Wrong! This book delves into the characters of these two women, revealing childhood issues that shaped them. There are surprising twists at the end of this tale that had me re-reading the last chapters. This wasn't an uplifting book, it was disturbing in many ways, as the many sides to humanity can be.
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Summary: I wish I hadn't read it!
Review: I won't tell you how this book ends, but I was totally depressed by it! There wasn't an ending! I put the book down and was disgusted. One of the books, though I did enjoy while reading, I wish I hadn't ever picked up.
Rating:
Summary: I wish I hadn't read it!
Review: I won't tell you how this book ends, but I was totally depressed by it! There wasn't an ending! I put the book down and was disgusted. One of the books, though I did enjoy while reading, I wish I hadn't ever picked up.
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Summary: This is a poignant story about the aftermath of an adoption.
Review: Lost Daughters chronicles the inner lives of a "birth" mother and her daughter in the days leading up to the daughter's twenty first birthday, when she can legally have access to her adoption files. The novel is less about adoption, per se, than a meditation on the powerful issues of belonging within a family, and coming to terms with the kinds of choices in one's life that really do become forks in the road and thus shape--often unintentionally--the path ahead. There are unexpected twists in the plot, but the heart of the novel is really about the emotional terrain that such losses entail. Laurie Alberts, in her last novel, The Price Of Land In Shelby, and again here, in Lost Daughters, demonstrates the ability to become the fly on the wall, so that the reader is offered a full view of the characters' experiences. This is especially true fo Lila, the young daughter who is about to come of age, legally, just before her college graduation. Allie, perhaps because her voice is written in first person and thus her experience is filtered only through her own point of view, without that slight remove, remains a tiny bit less clear, if more intimate, and ultimately, the reader realizes intense ties to her character. Laurie Alberts does something brave in her fiction: she allows us close to the twisted, poignant, ultimately almost resiliant parts of people's selves, not in a loud way, but more quietly, the way we ourselves experience our own lives. In doing so, her work delivers intimate portraits of people we think we might already know.
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Summary: Not much fun at all.
Review: Nothing happens in this novel. The chapters alternate: Allie, lost daughter Lila. Allie and Lila seem exactly alike -- whiny, self-centered. No real character development at all.Allie spends the novel sulking in a Buddhist retreat. She details her boring yet unpleasant childhood in a memoir for Lila. In alternating chapters, Lila's memories wallow on for pages, reeking with self-pity over the "tragedy" of being adopted. This is when she's not sneering at her decent and caring adoptive parents for being so conventional. The novel briefly kicks into life between pages 175 and 192 as both Lila and Allie seem to be heading into town to visit the adoption agency at the same time. It's Lila's 21st birthday when her adoption files will be "unsealed." Will they meet? Will Allie drop off her memoir in time? Then comes the twist ending that reduces the novel to what? A memoir-as-therapy session for Allie? A writing exercise from a writer who did a lot better with her first novel? Readers, save your money.
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