The Secret of Lost Things

This novel by Sheridan Hayes is not very good. It’s a coming-of-age story about a Tasmanian girl who goes to work in a bookstore in New York. It’s set in the eighties, though it took me three-quarters of the book to work that out, because it doesn’t sound like the eighties at all, and the girl is not anything at all like a modern teenager; I’d guessed it was the twenties. The characters don’t sound American (e.g. asking for black coffee!) and are caricatures (someone likes Dickens, evidently). None of the lost things are eventually found – the secret is obviously that lost things are lost – and while the girl somehow gains some kind of understanding, it was lost on me. Derivative, and not very interesting – it really didn’t feel as though the author put too much of herself into this one.