Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of How to Be Lost

How to Be Lost
How to Be Lost
Author: Amanda Eyre Ward
Genre: Literature & Fiction
Book Type: Paperback
reviewed on + 3 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 4


It's not that this book was bad. It had a good plot idea and it was a fast read (I read it in 2 days). However, it left a lot of questions unanswered and the dialogue in it wasn't all that great. Conversations between characters were cut short. The sentences were broken or seperated by commas or periods and confused me while I was trying to read, interrupting the flow of the story. In short, it was choppy. I felt like the author could have done a much better job than she did. I kept thinking, as I was reading it, that a high schooler could have written a better story. It was like I was reading an outline rather than an actual novel.

I want to know how Agnes Fowler got to where she was (and I'm not talking about what she's been doing but how she got to be with her dad). There's a huge gap between her being 5 and then 21. What happened in between those two ages? She alludes to the fact that her dad was overprotective but never goes into details. I also found her character extremely annoying. I wanted to skip over the chapters when it said "From the desk of Agnes Fowler" but didn't because I knew they had something important in them. She was more like a high schooler than she was an adult. I really can't express how much I disliked her. And who talks to people the way she does in her letters without meeting them first? Especially when she answered the question about her perfect first date. I almost gave up on the book after reading that part.

What happened between Ron and Caroline? It never states why they don't like each other, just that they never got along. And I really wanted to know what happened to Isabelle (not the mother).

The ending was terrible, in my opinion....unless there's a sequal explaining what happened to all the characters. I honestly wouldn't want to read a sequal to this book, though. The author had too much going on in this first one that I think a sequal would annoy me even more. It was so poorly written and the different plots so scatterbrained that I couldn't wait to finish it so I could move on to another book. A friend of mine said that she didn't care for this novel either but really loves Amanda Eyre Ward's other novels so I will give her one more shot.