Set against a layered Manhattan landscape, The Special Power of Restoring Lost Things explores a fractured family through the alternating perspectives of the mother, father, and brother of a young woman during the aftermath of her disappearance.
A year of silent but collective anguish culminates in the fateful thirty hours after a body with a striking resemblance to hers is found, and we see her buttoned-up Upper West Side family spiral in different, dangerous directions: Her mother, Carol, nearly comatose by day, comes alive at night in a vigilante-like attempt to track down her daughter's killer. Her brother, Ben, once the "good kid," adopts her bad habits along with her former friends who may have been complicit in her death. And after failing to keep his family from splitting apart, her seemingly stoic father, Drew, finally allows himself to crack.
In her third novel, Courtney Elizabeth Mauk presents a nuanced character study and offers a jolting and unforgettable portrait of a family's struggle to survive.
***
Carol pictured somewhere larger, louder, a place where getting lost would be a common mistake. ONE
(Little A, 1 October 2016, ebook, 242 pages, bought from @AmazonKindle)
***
***
This is a new author for me. This was an Amazon First Reads title back in September 2016 but I never got round to reading it. I thought this was a great book and I wish I'd got a chance to enjoy it sooner. It's a real tear-jerk that punches a hole in your heart. The focus of the book is a family, falling into various pieces after the daughter vanishes. The anguish they've experienced in the year since is powerfully rendered and the book is hard to read at times. The pain of the family only increases when their worst fears are realised. I cried so much reading The Special Power of Restoring Lost Things. I would have given this 5-star's but I had an issue with the actions of Carol in the final pages. This is a good book though.
