How to be Lost, by Amanda Eyre Ward

I must admit, part of the reason I bought this book was the Montana references. I am from Montana originally and it is rare to find book characters outside of westerns (which I hate)who are from there or even visit there. A good part of the book takes place in Missoula, MT. I am from Great Falls, MT, originally and went to school in Missoula, and I enjoyed reading about all the familiar places there.

The other, and main, reason I bought it was just that it sounded really intriguing. The book is written from the point of view of Caroline, whose sister disappeared at age five. Caroline was 15 at the time, and they had another sister, Madeline, who was in middle school then. Since that time, their father more or less drank himself to death. Their mother had never really been able to move on. Madeline and Caroline had drifted apart.

Now Caroline is 32 and has never really gotten her life together. She ran away to New Orleans and became a cocktail waitress (the story is pre-Katrina). She drinks way too much. She dreads going home for the holidays. On her last visit, her mother showed her a photo from a magazine, of a girl she was sure was her long-lost sister Ellie.

Then Caroline's mother dies and she loses her job, and she decides to search for Ellie. In the course of her search, you tend to wonder who is really lost here. The story is fairly gripping in that you want the sisters to reunite already. The back story of who took Ellie and why is pretty interesting as well. Caroline does grow quite a bit as a person over the course of the story, but I still felt she had a ways to go--Alcoholics Anonymous might be a start.

I look forward to reading more by this author. She has written one other book so far, Sleep Toward Heaven, and I plan to check that out.