Lost Daughters

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.

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.