The problem with having an amazing book like Before
We Were Yours that has been highly praised and lived on the best seller list
for a long time is the pressure for the writer to follow-up with another outstanding
book. Lisa Wingate’s The Book of Lost Friends is an okay novel but not nearly
as compelling as her previous book.
Using two timelines again, Wingate unfolds the story
of Hannie, a former slave, in the year 1875 on a plantation in Augustine, Louisiana,
who would like to find the family she was separated from when they were sold at
slave auctions. Through a series of trying circumstances involving two
half-sisters who are daughters of the plantation owner, she learns about
advertisements that had been placed in a publication to find separated family members,
or "Lost Friends."
Fast forward to 1987 to Augustine, Louisiana, where
Benny Silver is trying to work off her student loans by teaching in a school
where most the children live at poverty level or below. When no relevance can
be found for them in reading Animal Farm, Benny stumbles on a project
that will help them to connect with their ancestors.
The intersection of the two timelines comes with the
setting. Benny is renting a house on the very property where Hannie was first a
slave then later a sharecropper.
Sticking with historical fiction, Lisa Wingate has
used the advertisements that ran in Southern newspapers after the Civil War as
a jumping off point for this story. I have read several of Wingate’s books and
have found her to be a captivating writer.
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