Book Review: The Department of Lost & Found
(This book review first appeared on my previous breast cancer blog, but I wanted to reprint it here since we’re giving away a copy of the newly released paperback!)
The Department of Lost & Found by Allison Winn Scotch was the best book I’d read in a long time. It’s Allison Winn Scotch’s debut novel and though it is a work of fiction, it reads like a memoir, the memoir of someone I wish I knew. No … someone I wish I had as a best girlfriend.
This book is beyond touching … it speaks to your soul. As a survivor, I connect to the fictional main character the way I connect to any member of the sisterhood.
The Department of Lost & Found is not pure chick lit and it’s not pure romance; this book has a little of both genres woven into it and I couldn’t put it down. It was an amazing dichotomy: I couldn’t wait to finish this book and when I finally did, I was sad that is was over because I enjoyed reading it so much. I wished it went on and on. Now, I crave a sequel. (Allison, can you get going on one, please?)
Here’s a synopsis: the book’s heroine, Natalie Miller, a 30-year-old single woman working as a senatorial aide, is loaded with ambition and gumption. Her world is rocked when she’s diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s where the story begins … read this excerpt from page 13:
“So you have to understand that in the span of less than a month, my (disloyal, scum-sucking) boyfriend of two years dumped me (”I can’t handle this” is how he put it, right before I threw a vase at his head, which, surprisingly enough, because he wasn’t much of an athlete, he actually manged to duck); my job, which previously had been my lifeblood, had been paired down to admittedly semidesperate emails; and my health, my mortality, something I’d never even given a flying fig of a thought to, was suddenly in total jeopardy. So it’s not hard to see why I was coming more than slightly undone.”
I mean, even though I have little in common with Nat, her story resonates with me, deeply. That’s the way that cancer thing is … time and time again, I notice, it gives us a shared experience.
A shared experience. I found myself thinking, that’s what bonds Natalie Miller and I together. Then I remember she isn’t human.
Back to the synopsis: After she’s diagnosed, Nat explores her previous “failed” relationships, the five great loves of her life. She considers starting a completely new relationship (with a good friend’s ex, man, that’s messy). She struggles to maintain her foothold at work while her responsibilities are being filled by someone not combating the effects of chemotherapy. She is forced to look at the professional choices she’s makes and why she makes them. She leans on her friends and angers her friends and leans on her friends some more. She’s so real.
This book is filled with many real moments — that’s why it reads like a true story.
Like the night before Nat’s mastectomy when she bids farewell to her breasts (here, I’ve spliced the paragraph, found on page 173, but the entire graf is among my favorites):
“I sat up in the soapy waters of my tub and held them both, my breasts. I wanted to mourn them, to kiss them good-bye and say that I’d miss them, but really I was too angry … These things, these symbols of my womanhood, these swollen mounds that were supposed to feed my children and display my ripeness to the world had done just the opposite … as I looked down on them that night, covered in frothy bubbles and hot water, I despised both them and what they’d done to me.”
Like the way Nat tracked the passing of time with her chemotherapy cycles (page 205):
“That’s what it’s like to live with cancer — it’s hard to remove it from your life, even when you’re talking about something else entirely.”
Like when Nat shopped for a party dress after enduring her treatment and took a good look at herself in the mirror, thinking about the words of another survivor, Susanna (page 263):
“I stood naked in front of the mirror … and stared at my body, so foreign, so different from when I started … and remembered Susanna’s wise words: that my body was just a vessel. What it carried inside of it was what really mattered.”
In The Department of Lost & Found, Allison Winn Scotch aptly balances the seriousness of breast cancer with humor — really funny stuff, stuff that makes me smile just thinking back. Like Nat’s obsession with The Price is Right. Or her adventures with marijuana (for medical purposes of course). I mean, there’s some great comical elements in this book, which lightens the burden of the main character’s disease. And that lightens the burden of ours, doesn’t it?
So there you have it — my take on this brilliant novel. My strong opinion is that this is a must read for any woman, but especially the breast cancer survivor. Well done Allison Winn Scotch. Well done.
(Image: Allison Winn Scotch)
Tags: book review, breast cancer, cancer, fiction, health, wellness, womenRelated Stories
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