The Book: Lost in the Forest, by Sue Miller
The Story: Like most of Sue Miller’s books, Lost in the Forest is a family drama. Of course, this is a more “modern” family, with divorced parents, a step-dad and friends who are considered family. Let me lay some groundwork. Eva and Mark were married and had two girls, Emily and Daisy. They divorced and Eva got married again to a guy named John. They had a son named Theo. Gracie is Eva’s best friend and her husband is Duncan. Those are all of the main players.
In the very first chapter, John dies by being struck by a car while out for a walk. Really, the first half of this book is the entire extended family dealing with this grief. Eva is distraught and Mark ends up watching all of the kids, even Theo. Emily is visibly sad and really vocal about it while Daisy is just quieter. Because this book is written from several different perspectives, we get to see this a lot of different ways. Daisy is an interesting character because when we see her from the other perspectives, she just seems like a shallow, whiney teenager, but when she is given a chance to “speak,” the reader really finds out that she is deeper than that and more desperate for attention than anyone really realizes.
The second half of the book focuses on Daisy a lot and that search for attention and approval. She starts to kind of lose control. She starts stealing and sleeping with a pretty unlikely suspect and hiding pretty much her whole life from everyone around her. Her part of the story is written in a way that we get glimpses of how Daisy actually turns out, which makes her character much more complex than the others.
A real under riding current in this book is the idea of happiness. It just an idea that many characters- main and background- end up sharing their view of. Mark’s mom sees happiness as merely contentment. There is a self-help speaker who lays out the steps. Near the end one of the characters (I can’t remember who) says that as Americans we just want to push a button and be happy. These are just the examples that pop into my head right off the bat. There were a lot of bits about happiness and it was interesting to see how the different views on happiness effect the characters who feel that way.
What I Thought: I kind of have a thing for Sue Miller. She and Anne Lammott write the best domestic drama-type books around, and I love me some domestic drama. I’m not even sure if that is a term, but what I’m saying is that I like a book that puts a family in some random situation and then lets them squirm out together. I can’t get enough.
What I like about Sue Miller is how honest her characters are. If you read my blog for any amount of time, you’ll always hear me come back to this. I want characters who feel and who react in real, honest ways. These characters do this. They are vulnerable and their relationships with each other seem like relationships that could really happen.
The only issue I had with this book was that the characters were just so totally caught up in each others lives that there is never any perspective, for the reader or for the characters. The focus is so slim that it does seem to lose something.
Conclusion: This is a short, little book that packs a pretty good punch. Probably not Sue Miller’s best, but it’s still good stuff.