I read Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash months ago – ridiculous to be writing a review now but I am because, since reading it (in May), I have recommended it to so many people.

And this is what I say when I recommend it – “The ending isn’t fab but it doesn’t matter because by the time you get there, you will have laughed so much, you won’t care.”

And then I go on to say that I suspect Cash’s publisher wanted some sort of action-packed, neat conclusion, when what she really ought to have done is a Franzen-style continuation of family angst. I would have been fine with that.

The story focuses on the Flynn family, in which each member is having their own particular crisis. Parents, Catherine and Bud, have a freshly open marriage (with varying levels of enthusiasm for its ‘openness’) –

“It’s a lot to ask from one person,” Jim Doherty had told her. “To be the stable husband and the sole provider and the Casanova.”
“But that’s marriage.”
“Forgive my candor, but have you ever considered outsourcing?”
“Outsourcing?”
“I’m just saying. It takes a village.”

Abigail, their eldest daughter, is dating a man nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; and the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone is monitoring the town’s citizens.

All complex female characters needed conflict and adversity, thought Harper. She was a troublemaker with no origin story.

Louise was so sick of being average. If not profound beauty, inner or not, couldn’t she at least have generational wealth or a major disability?

Cash’s very dark humour is exactly my thing. I read this book on a plane and kept getting looks from other passengers – was I laughing too loudly or were they simply trying to see what I was reading so that they could get onboard? Anyway, for some readers, it will be too much.

Catherine had briefly wondered, as all women do their first time alone with a man, if he was going to murder her.

Bud’s frustration was more powerful than his breathing exercises.

The dialogue is superb, particularly between the parents and the girls – snappy, to-the-point, and calling out to be turned into a movie script (because the silences and the side-eye between the teens and the parents will be priceless).

“When you wear that much makeup, it tells men that you’re only interested in one thing,” said Catherine.
“Good,” said Abigail. “It saves me the trouble of telling them myself.”

If you’re keen, you can think deeply about some of the themes that Cash has woven into the particular circumstances that her characters find themselves in. The main theme focuses on surveillance and who is watching who, at both the macro and micro level, but there is also much to be said about the dynamics of family relationships –

They did not fight for many years. Passivity proved a greater strain than anger.

Can’t wait for Cash’s next book.

4/5

“Have you fed the girls dinner?”
“Of course I fed the girls dinner.”
“What did you make?”
“First course,” said Catherine, “was salmon pinwheels and Gorgonzola-stuffed pears. Then a beef Wellington I labored over all afternoon with caramelized pearl onions. Bread pudding for dessert.”
Catherine opened the pantry. Some buckwheat. Stale oyster crackers. A scuba diving bath toy. She opened the fridge… A note in Abigail’s flouncy handwriting stuck on the crisper bin: GO TO THE MARKET!!