BookBrowse Reviews Lost In The Forest by Sue Miller

BookBrowse:

Engrossing characters and a plot that turns unexpected corners. Novel

Sue Miller turns her magnifying glass on the family of Eva and Mark. Their marriage hit a road bump some years back when Mark had an affair, and their three teenage children now live with Eva and her second husband, John - that is until he dies in a freak accident and Mark comes back into Eva's life to help with the children while she grieves.  While John is waking up to the fact that he still loves Eva, Eva is confounded by her own grief, and the three children deal with events in their own way, with much of the focus being on 15-year-old Daisy as she deals with her loss via various secret acts of defiance, culminating in an affair with an older man. 

The question is, how will the characters find their way through this loss and can Daisy find her way back to her path and out of the arms of the predatory wolf (á la Little Red Riding Hood) or will she be permanently lost in the forest?  I know this sounds like pretty standard stuff but as I've said before (and will likely say again!) it's not what you tell, it's the way you tell it.  In Miller's hands other people's lives are surprisingly interesting!

Selected Reviews
"..... this fine novel ....  is in fact gently comic. For, as we know, comedy in literature stresses the community, and its ongoing life, while tragedy stresses the individual, who is doomed. Lost in the Forest is a comedy in the exact and best literary sense, for it stresses beautifully the continuation of the social unit with which it is concerned." - Washington Post.

"....while some of her plots (that of While I Was Gone, for example) can be cluttered and occasionally clumsy, Lost in the Forest has a seemingly effortless grace; Miller quickly captures and never loses our attention." - The New York Times Sunday Review.

This review first ran in the August 2, 2006 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.