How to be Lost: A Novel (Paperback)

It all happened one afternoon fifteen years ago: Ellie became obsessed with wanting to runaway, in part to escape the fatherly abuse, but also for the thrill of the adventure. When Caroline, the oldest and the novel's narrator, receives her driver's license, the three girls decide to abscond New Orleans. But unhappily, the girls' plan must be aborted because five-year-old Ellie doesn't return from elementary school the afternoon they plan to flee.

Fifteen years later, Caroline has escaped to New Orleans, where she's living an aimless life, absorbed in her job as a cocktail waitress and spending her spare time drinking and partying. Distancing herself from her family, she's reluctant to go back to suburban Holt, New York even though her sister Madeline, now married and upwardly mobile, constantly asks her to; family reunions are a chore, with Christmases being the worst. So Caroline spends her days waiting and drifting, thinking about her mother's false cheer, her father's bloody death, and Madeline, always "looking towards her for hope."

Each blames the other for Ellie's disappearance, but it is their mother who is finding it hardest to cope. Now widowed, she gravitates between hyperactive joviality - an obsession with parties and entertaining - to a kind of willful resignation to find her long-lost youngest daughter. Tested to the depths of her soul, she fanatically wrestles with the resolution of past and present. When she thinks she sees a faint photograph of Ellie in an old People magazine article about a rodeo in Missoula, she tries persuades Caroline to go to Montana to search for her.

Of course, Caroline is initially reluctant to do so, but something draws her to the photograph; the resemblance to Ellie is startling - especially her eyes and her smile. But Caroline is sure that if Ellie had lived she would have called her. "For sixteen years, I had waited. Sometimes I stood by the window, willing her to turn the corner, to knock on my door. She waited, just outside my line of vision."

Caroline eventually reaches the small Montana town and befriends a stray soul that she believes to be Ellie, but things don't exactly work out as planned. For someone in the town has recognized the photos of Ellie that Caroline, in a fit of desperation, has been placing on notice boards and café walls. Missoula is a small town, and perhaps Ellie herself has seen the photographs?

Ward successfully provides an unforeseen, surprising, and emotionally resolute end to the story. Old family secrets are gradually revealed, and the sisters are provided with some answers to a mystery that has haunted them for years. The author assaults the reader with some of the most sparsely beautiful and controlled prose, the language perfectly formed: the heat had dimmed, but the smell of New Orleans seemed to grow stronger: old meat, sweat and beer."

Caroline knows that there is a reckoning to be had, and that she can't go on living a life, a prisoner of memory, gripped by the ghosts of her past. She must remake and try to salvage what is left of her broken family and hope that the shattered pieces will all fit together. "It was just loss pure and simple. Loss - its heavy ache; it made the tears run down my cheeks."

Through her cross-country road trip - her quest to find Ellie, Caroline will hopefully be able to unravel her conflicted feelings, and also find the answers to a loss that has so utterly consumed her family and a mystery that has so bitterly eluded them.