Review – The Lost Girl

Title: The Lost Girl

Author: Sangu Mandanna

Publisher:  Balzer + Bray

Publish Date: August 28, 2012

ISBN-13: 978-0062082312

Available at: Amazon – Kindle – Barnes and Noble

From Goodreads:

Eva’s life is not her own. She is a creation, an abomination—an echo. Made by the Weavers as a copy of someone else, she is expected to replace a girl named Amarra, her “other”, if she ever died. Eva studies what Amarra does, what she eats, what it’s like to kiss her boyfriend, Ray. So when Amarra is killed in a car crash, Eva should be ready.

But fifteen years of studying never prepared her for this.

Now she must abandon everything she’s ever known—the guardians who raised her, the boy she’s forbidden to love—to move to India and convince the world that Amarra is still alive.

What Eva finds is a grief-stricken family; parents unsure how to handle this echo they thought they wanted; and Ray, who knew every detail, every contour of Amarra. And when Eva is unexpectedly dealt a fatal blow that will change her existence forever, she is forced to choose: Stay and live out her years as a copy or leave and risk it all for the freedom to be an original. To be Eva.

From debut novelist Sangu Mandanna comes the dazzling story of a girl who was always told what she had to be—until she found the strength to decide for herself.

Review:

Eva is an echo. She was created to take the place of Amarra if she were to ever die. Eva’s life is spent studying Amarra’s life and following the Loom’s strict laws. She knows at any moment her familiars or the family that she belongs to could execute a Sleep Order on her which would end her life.

From the very beginning this book draws you in. The plot itself is wholly engaging and as I learned about Eva’s life my sympathy for her grew. She was so trapped by the laws confining an echo. What stolen pleasures she had were precious and few. I admired her need to define herself individually. She had desires apart from her life as an echo. In this way she rebelled against the laws that governed her life. Eva also showed a lot of strength in adversity.

I liked Sean a lot but I kind of wondered why one of her guardians became so intimate with her. I thought that the people in charge would have had better sense then that. It made for a good story though. So while Sean was really conscious of obeying some of the laws, yet he was willing to bend other rules. He picked his battles. Although I thought that he should have been  His respect of her need to have an identity that wasn’t an echo of Amarra was what made me like him the most.

I loved this book. It was fast paced and I became really invested in the characters. In the end I was only disappointed with the fact that the follow up book hasn’t been released yet.

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