I bought The Lost Girls on impulse because it was sitting on a Barnes and Noble table looking all psychological thriller-y and because I have zero self control. I found the book to be well-written and immersive, but a psychological thriller it is not, and I felt like the jacket copy lied to me.  Also anyone considering reading it should be warned that there is a scene involving sexual abuse of a child. It’s not especially graphic but it’s there.

The book follows the lives of two women, Justine and Lucy. When the book opens Lucy has passed away, leaving her rural Minnesota lake house to her great-niece, Justine. We get Lucy’s voice in the form of her diaries, a detailed explanation of the house and what it meant to her.  Lucy’s family was relatively well-off (her father owned a pharmacy) and they  summered at the lake house every year. For her and her sisters, Lilith and Emily, it was a magical place where summer memories of swimming in the lake, playing in the woods, and generally having freedom to run wild took form. Then in  the summer of 1935 Emily (then six) went missing, an event that destroyed their family.

When Justine inherits the house she (and her two young daughters) are running from a bad relationship. This cabin represents freedom to her as well, and a place to hide. After moving in Justine learns more about Lucy’s childhood and Emily’s disappearance, and she’s also slightly creeped out by her odd (and only) neighbors, two men that feature heavily in Lucy’s childhood reflections. Atmosphere-wise, this novel is like an upper-Midwest gothic.

So I bought The Lost Girls specifically due to the jacket copy dropping this little kernel of creepiness:

“Soon Justine’s troubled oldest daughter becomes obsessed with Emily’s disappearance, her mother arrives to steal her inheritance, and the man she left launches a dangerous plan to get her back. In a house haunted by the sorrows of the women who came before her, Justine must overcome their tragic legacy if she hopes to save herself and her children.”

Problem is, this isn’t true.  Justine’s daughter doesn’t become obsessed with Emily’s disappearance. In fact, while Justine is aware of, and troubled by, Emily’s vanishing, it doesn’t really take center stage in her mind. She’s more worried about her controlling ex finding them, repairing a dilapidated turn-of-the-century cabin to make it livable, and carving out a life for herself and her daughters amid the isolation of a rural Minnesota winter.

Emily’s disappearance is the centerpiece in Lucy’s entries, the crisis that everything is building up to. It’s just a small part of what Justine is dealing with.

This book is really about the relationships between women–between sisters and between mothers and daughters. When Lucy writes about the summer of 1935 she’s focused on how her relationship with her older sister, Lilith, changed dramatically as Lilith entered puberty. She writes about the loss of her childhood innocence for reasons that extend beyond what happened to Emily.

Justine’s chapters are about examining her own flawed relationship with her mother and how that impacted her choice of partners over the years, as well as her relationship with her own daughters. Justine’s mother is a narcissist, always moving from one place and one man to the next. She feels like the world hasn’t given her anything she’s entitled to, and her emotional and physical neglect of Justine has left lasting scars.

While all of this is going on, the lake house acts as a character in itself. When Lucy is growing up in the thirties, having a second home is a luxury and a sign of wealth. The families who summer at the lake are all upper-middle or upper class. When Justine inherits it, the lake house is a small home not built to be occupied during a Minnesota winter. When Lucy is a child the lake is thriving with other visiting families. When Justine is there, she’s almost completely isolated from the outside world. The value of the house shifts over eighty years (of course) but in many ways it represents the decay following Lucy and Justine’s family over generations.

The tone of the whole novel is melancholy and thoughtful, whether through Lucy’s sepia-toned memories or Justine’s more grown-up reflections. It is never actually scary and it’s also pretty easy to figure out what happened to Emily. It’s not really a mystery in any regard.

If I had known what this book was really about, I probably wouldn’t have bought it. I was looking purely for the scary-creep factor and it wasn’t present in The Lost Girls. It’s not a bad book, not at all, but it wasn’t the book I was looking for. I felt cheated that the summary didn’t actually represent the pages within.

If I had to grade The Lost Girls purely on it’s merit as a work of literary fiction, I’d give it a solid B. As the psychological thriller it was marketed as, it gets a D. Emily’s disappearance plays such a small role in the book and isn’t even focused on until the end. It could be the glue that holds the competing narratives together–instead it’s an afterthought. I’m going to average these grades together and the novel a C because while it wasn’t what I thought I was buying, it was still a good book.

That said, when I’m paying hardcover prices, I expect to get the genre of book being pitched to me.