Lost follows Cindy Carver, a 40-something divorced mom of two who lives in Toronto in the early 2000s. When Cindy’s eldest daughter, aspiring actress Julia, doesn’t show up for her bridesmaid’s fitting, Cindy starts to worry. Most of the rest of the book is Cindy’s amateur attempts to find Julia as she grows increasingly paranoid and sleep deprived. There are occasional interludes where Cindy is spending time with her friends, her family (mother, sister, younger daughter), and her new romantic interest, but during all of these other interactions Cindy is preoccupied- obsessed even- with thoughts about her daughter, and where her daughter could be.
In her favor, Joy Fielding writes well, the plot holes aren’t incredibly glaring and the mystery is compelling. Despite these good points, I found the main character, Cindy, aggravating bordering on unlikable. She almost deliberately sabotages relationships with everyone except the missing daughter- a daughter who, quite frankly, seems worse than Cindy, and isn’t a person that you wouldn’t miss all that much. Cindy also overreacts to all scenarios and is a destructive force as she tries to do the police’s job for them (despite everything indicating that the police are doing their job). She was exhausting.
I didn’t hate this, but I didn’t love it either- by the end I was really reading for the outcome (where is the daughter?!) and not much else.