The Secret of Lost Things

A story of growth. This is a novel of losing one's youth and struggling to become an adult. At 18 Rosemary Savage has lost her mother, never known her father and left the only home she knows: Tasmania. She defects to New York City to start a life she never dreamed she would be able to have, yet secretly yearned for. When at New York she secures a job in an infamous book store-The Arcade. She creates a surrogate family out of the staff and falls in love one its members. A choice that only a very young and naive person could make. That he would break her heart is certain, and despite the advice of the rest of her "family," she continues to pursue him. However, that is only part of the story. While she is cultivating this "love" rumours grow of finding a lost manuscript of Herman Melville's. Through detective work she figures out that the possibility of a novel is based in fact, though the odds of the rumour being true rather slim. In the end, it was only a romantics hope that the missing novel, the secret of a lost thing, could in fact be true.

It is a beutifully written story filled with exceptional quotes (some favorites to follow) and stunning language. While I didn't find myself entrhalled with the actual story, I couln't stop reading solely because it was so well written. Above all it is about the love of books and how certain authors and books speak to us during critical times of our lives.

Rosemary for remembrance.

Favorite Quotes:

 "I dreamed she lived often enough to wake with the kind of longing that makes memory eloqent. While I slept she had lived, and the pain upon waking was a much a fleeting uncertainty of her state as anguish over the clear fact of my own life continuing without her. We are never so aware of those we have lost, and dreamt of, than in that waking moment."

"No remedy but to read."

"Reality is as thin as paper, girl," said Pearl, shaking her head. I thought that was one thing you did know, what with an imagination like yours-as thin as paper, and as easily torn."

"I knew books to be objects that loved to cluster and form disordered piles, but here books seemed robbed of their zany capacity to fall about, to conspire. In the library, books behaved themselves."

"The Secret of Lost Things" by Sheridan Hay