Lost Daughters (Hardscrabble Books-Fiction of New England) [Hardcover]

Laurie Alberts (Author)

Book Description

Series: Hardscrabble Books-Fiction of New England | Publication Date: March 1, 1999

A novel that turns the traditional adoption narrative on its head as it explores how lies move through generations.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A mother's decision to track down the daughter she gave up for adoption, and an adopted daughter's simultaneous decision to find her birth mother, form the premise for this affecting but ultimately disappointing novel by Vermont author Alberts (The Price of Land in Shelby). The mother, Allie Heller, who first appeared in Alberts's 1987 Michener Award-winning novel, Tempting Fate, is now a freelance travel writer in New York, staying at a Zen center's motel in New Mexico, the state where she gave up her daughter, Lila, 21 years ago. Lila is now an art student in Massachusetts who has just had an abortion and flies home to her adoptive parents in Colorado Springs to recover. An only child raised in an Air Force family, Lila is baffled by her indeterminate ethnicity, and decides to go to New Mexico and see what her adoption files reveal. The stories of the two women are told in alternating chapters, with Allie's troubled history emerging in flashbacks, written as letters to her unknown daughter. Although the narrative has inherent suspense, the ending is contrived and rushed, with too many dramatic plot twists suddenly introduced without sufficient development. The twin themes of lies ("The gap between what they tell you and what they cannot tell you is where the lies take hold," as Allie writes to Lila) and truths ("truth has always been a slippery fish...") delineate the pathos of this lost mother/daughter relationship, but at the crucial moment, the author unravels yet another hidden secret, the one that held the entire narrative together. The effect is surprising but unsatisfying; in fact, readers may feel cheated by Alberts's trompe d'oeil resolution.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In her latest novel, Alberts (The Price of Land in Shelby, LJ 9/15/96) explores the world of lies?the lies we tell and the lies we are told. She does so by involving the reader in a lie, for this is a far different book at the end from the one we thought we were reading. Allie Heller, whom we first met in Alberts's Tempting Fate (Houghton, 1987), is spending a week at a Buddhist retreat and preparing her memoirs to be placed in a file for the daughter she gave away at birth. It is the week of the daughter's 21st birthday. Alternating chapters are written in the voice of the daughter, Lila, who is now deciding on abortion for "the only blood relative she may ever know." We see how these strangers share so much history and how lies have shaped both of their lives. The climax of the book gives the reader a real jolt and will anger many. An excellent choice for book club discussion.?Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 217 pages
• Publisher: UPNE; 1st edition (March 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0874518989
• ISBN-13: 978-0874518986
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,454,354 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a poignant story about the aftermath of an adoption., April 15, 1999

By 

H. Baskin "networking queen" (Northampton, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lost Daughters (Hardscrabble Books-Fiction of New England) (Hardcover)

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars Characters that aren't what they seem..., September 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Lost Daughters (Hardscrabble Books-Fiction of New England) (Hardcover)

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.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I wish I hadn't read it!, October 17, 2000

By 

Karen (Newport, NH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lost Daughters (Hardscrabble Books-Fiction of New England) (Hardcover)

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.