Blog Tour Review: The Lost Girls – Heather Young

Today is my spot on the blog tour for ‘The Lost Girls’ by Heather Young. Thank you to Verve Books for my spot on the tour and the E-ARC I received to review.

About the Author:

Heather Young –

 is the author of two  novels. Her debut, The Lost Girls, won the  Strand Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for an Edgar Award.

Her second  novel, The Distant Dead has also been  nominated for the 2021 Edgar Award for Best  Novel.

A former antitrust and intellectual  property litigator, she traded the legal world  for the literary one and earned her MFA from  the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2011. She  lives in Mill Valley, California, where she writes,  bikes, hikes, and reads books by other people  that she wishes she’d written. 

Author links:

Twitter https://twitter.com/HYoungwriter

Website https://www.heatheryoungwriter.com/

About The Book:

In the summer of 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family’s vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her disappearance destroys her mother, who spends the rest of her life at the lake house, hoping in vain that her favorite daughter will walk out of the woods. Emily’s two older sisters stay, too, each keeping her own private, decades-long vigil for the lost child.

Sixty years later Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before she dies, she writes the story of that devastating summer in a notebook that she leaves, along with the house, to the only person to whom it might matter: her grandniece, Justine.

For Justine, the lake house offers a chance to escape her manipulative boyfriend and give her daughters the stable home she never had. But it’s not the sanctuary she hoped for. The long Minnesota winter has begun. The house is cold and dilapidated, the frozen lake is silent and forbidding, and her only neighbor is a strange old man who seems to know more than he’s telling about the summer of 1935.

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

Purchase Link – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lost-Girls-Heather-Young/dp/0857308181

My Review:

I received an E-ARC copy of ‘The Lost Girls’ by Heather Young from the publisher Verve Books in return for my honest review. Thank you to the publisher for my review copy.

This book follows Justine, her children, and her Great Aunt Lucy.

When Lucy passes away, Justine is left her home in the will. Wanting a new start, she moves her daughters Melanie and Angela straight away, leaving her old life behind.

The house has a dark past with the disappearance of Lucy’s little sister Emily. When Lucy realises she doesn’t have much time left she decides to write about the true history and reveal the secrets of that fateful and devastating night.

Will Justine be able to get her fresh start? What secrets has Lucy been hiding all these years?

What follows is a beautiful but haunting story of family love and secrets.

This book is told from two points of view Lucy’s story of the past and Justine’s present as she moves and starts her new life. I liked that it went between these two characters lives as it shows the emotions and heart break they go through. I did find a bit slow at the start as you are getting to know the characters, but it is worth carrying on to hear the devastating secrets Lucy discloses.

I related to Justine in the way that she feels she can’t cope on her own, but she doesn’t want to just settle for a relationship that is not right for her. The way she comes to realise this is amazing and shows how strong you can be.

The family bond between Justine and her daughters is lovely too, and the struggle she goes through with her mother just adds to her distress.

It is scary how one event can shape the lives of so many people, through the generations and I think this is partly what leaves a haunting feeling.

Overall, a beautiful but haunting Mystery Thriller, that shows how one devastating night can affect a family’s whole life.

My Rating:

💜💜💜💜 /5

This tour continues until 11.12.21, so take a look at some of these other posts: