I was really expecting this to be a strong 4 star read, instead I’m rounding up to 3 stars. The things I didn’t like, someone else will love, I’m sure. But the last 20-25 % of the book took me from “this book is imperfect but I’m enjoying it” to “oh no, I don’t like this.” I’ve read a lot of romance novels that beautifully incorporate grief into the arc of one or more characters. After Left of Forever, my expectations were that Tarah DeWitt would handle complex emotions deftly and with care. Maybe she did, but it wasn’t in a way that worked for me.
When Lost and Found opens, Bea has just found out that her best friend, Merritt*, had harvested her eggs when she was diagnosed with cancer, and has left them to Bea. She leaves it up to Bea whether she wants to let the eggs go, or go through IVF. Bea has decided to try to get pregnant with Merritt’s eggs, which means she needs to rent out her house. After some drama with her mother (Team Mom, honestly), Bea moves into Silas’s house, even though they’ve always had a thing for each other. The forced proximity does what forced proximity does in a romance.
I don’t know enough about IVF to have any opinion on the way it is portrayed here, and everyone grieves differently, so while Bea’s grief journey didn’t particularly resonate with me, it wasn’t a terrible stumbling block. What did bother me was the distance DeWitt put between the emotion of the story and the reader. If this had been a movie, the camera would have started moving from character level to an increasingly distant perspective finally ending with a shot of the earth from space. Over the last few chapters, we move from Bea and Silas’s points of view to a more omniscient perspective, and in the epilogue, we’re moved beyond even that. It left me feeling like the story was brought to a close without letting us see any complex, messy emotions. It was a disappointment
I received this as an advance reader copy from St. Martin’s Griffen and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.
*One of my very dearest and longest friends is also named Merritt. I did call her and thank her for not being dead or giving me her harvested eggs.
