Two hours into a charter trip off the Oregon coast, a woman is braced against the rail of a boat with a rod bending in her hands, screaming that she will not be bested by a Picasso-looking fish. A deckhand asks her to mind the children on board. Her firefighter roommate, who has caught nothing all day and does not care, starts screaming it with her.<\/p>\n
She is out there because a letter told her to. Her best friend, dead of breast cancer a year earlier, wrote down the small things she regretted not doing, and one of them was going out on an ocean boat to find out whether halibut are actually real, because she was not convinced. That scene is where Lost and Found by Tarah DeWitt stopped being a book I was assessing and became a book I was inside.<\/p>\n
Bea Marshall is thirty, cuts hair on the edge of a town of fewer than a thousand people, and has spent a year working herself into the ground so she does not have to feel anything. Merritt left her more than a letter. Before chemotherapy she had her eggs frozen and willed them to Bea, along with a monthly storage bill and a deadline. Bea has decided to use them.<\/p>\n
What Tarah DeWitt does with those regrets is the cleverest structural choice in Lost and Found. They become a checklist, and the checklist becomes the courtship. Adopt a pet. Eat one of those insane sour candies you have to special order. Bake bread and get weirdly intense about a sourdough starter. Go and see about the halibut. Put Merritt\u2019s name on something permanent.<\/p>\n
So the romance advances by way of errands, and it should not work as well as it does. The sour candy chapter is the one I read out loud to somebody: they toast a dead woman with a jar of black spheres that come with a signed waiver, and eleven seconds later they are both hanging over a kitchen sink, drooling, howling. I laughed until my eyes watered, and the toast was still sitting underneath it. That double register is DeWitt\u2019s whole trick and she never fumbles it.<\/p>\n
Bea goes to look at rescue dogs and comes home with an orange cat who hisses at her, urinates on the rug and melts instantly for Silas. He names her Calcifur. She spends most of the novel treating Bea with open contempt.<\/p>\n
I want to defend the cat as a piece of craft, because she is not comic relief. She is the barometer. Every time Bea forces something into place the cat rebuffs her; the one night Bea genuinely stops performing recovery, the cat climbs onto her chest and stays. There is also a small, brutal beat where Silas mentions, kindly, that she will not be able to change a litter box once she is pregnant.<\/p>\n
The fertility material is unusually well researched. DeWitt thanks a friend for handing over her actual calendars and emails, and it reads that way. If you have looked into preserving fertility before cancer treatment<\/a> or read anything about how long stored eggs can legally be kept<\/a>, the clock hanging over Bea will feel real rather than a convenient plot timer.<\/p>\n I expected the scarred firefighter to be a familiar shape: wounded, growly, reassured by love. He is not that at all. Silas is loud, nosy, relentlessly funny and quietly certain he is nobody\u2019s first choice. He is the middle Byrd sibling, the one who gets his hug last, who steps aside so reliably he has mistaken it for a personality. When his sister\u2019s fianc\u00e9 asks him to be best man, his face doing the maths is the tenderest thing in the novel.<\/p>\n His secret, when it comes, undid me. Eight years earlier, on his own birthday, with no wallet on him, he stood in the general store beneath a canoe suspended from the ceiling that the town treats as a wishing well, unhooked his dead mother\u2019s gold chain and threw it up there for a girl who had just stopped answering his calls. Bea does not learn this until nearly the end, and when she climbs a ladder to look inside that canoe and finds coins and paper birds and one gold chain, I had to put the book down.<\/p>\n The scenes I keep returning to, though, are the burn survivors\u2019 meetings he tries three times to walk into. Nobody makes speeches. They play poker and Ping-Pong, and a woman whose husband died on a fire line tells him his pain does not owe him a lesson, that some things stay bad and you find what makes life worth it anyway. I have not read a better rebuttal of inspirational suffering in a romance novel.<\/p>\n Everything carrying the first two-thirds of Lost and Found by Tarah DeWitt thins out in the last one. Once Bea and Silas stop resisting each other the book runs out of trouble and starts manufacturing it, and the manufactured version is a misunderstanding about cardboard boxes that any of the dozens of honest conversations these two have already had would have dissolved in a sentence.<\/p>\n The pregnancy goes perfectly, too. DeWitt flags this in an author\u2019s note and I respect her for it, but knowing why does not put the tension back. And Devin, Merritt\u2019s sister, is the character I wanted more of and got least. Her anger is the only argument Bea cannot out-love, and she gets one restaurant scene before being smoothed away.<\/p>\n That smoothing is my other quarrel. The epilogue steps into Merritt\u2019s own head as she is dying, which is startling and lovely, and I would have taken it as the final page. Instead it expands outward into a roll call of everybody from the previous books, then turns to address the reader about the author\u2019s own life. The book had already ended beautifully. It just kept talking.<\/p>\n Say You\u2019ll Remember Me<\/a> by Abby Jimenez. The same balance of medical weight and refusal to stop being funny about it. Somewhere in the middle of Lost and Found by Tarah DeWitt, remembering a hospital bed and a whispered joke, Bea returns to the phrase she and Merritt used for every stupid thing they ever survived: \u201cWe were girls together.\u201d I have not been able to shake it. That is what Lost and Found is really about, underneath the firefighter and the sourdough starter and the very rude cat: what you do with a friendship after one half of it is gone, and whether you are allowed to be happy afterwards.<\/p>\n DeWitt\u2019s answer takes a third too long to arrive and gives her heroine an easier run than life would. I did not care much, and I suspect you will not either. Read it for the letter, for the list, and for the man who wished on his mother\u2019s necklace and then spent eight years not mentioning it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two hours into a charter trip off the Oregon coast, a woman is braced against the rail of a boat with a rod bending in her hands, screaming that she will not be bested by a Picasso-looking fish. A deckhand asks her to mind the children on board. Her firefighter roommate, who has caught nothing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7000"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7000\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Silas Is the One Who Surprised Me<\/h2>\n
Where It Falters<\/h2>\n
If You Finish This and Need Something Else<\/h2>\n
\nLeft of Forever<\/a> by Tarah DeWitt. Ellis and Wren\u2019s book, and the one that makes the family dinners here hit twice as hard.
\nFunny Story<\/a> by Emily Henry. For the forced-proximity housemates and the ache of loving someone you are trying to be sensible about.
\nSavor It<\/a> by Tarah DeWitt. Where Spunes started, and where the goats come from.<\/p>\nFinal Thoughts<\/h2>\n