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All who wander are not lost…
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Isn't it time you curled up with a good book?
“Once Was Lost” by Sara Zarr is this amazing story about redemption from a young adult’s viewpoint. I’m not talking about just any teenager, either. We have Sam who is a pastor’s kid; whose mother is in rehab after a DUI and isn’t returning her calls; whose dad has the right words for everyone. Everyone, except for Sam, that is.
As her dad stands in the pulpit to talk to his congregation, Sam is in the pews wondering if there is a God. Is there is such a thing as faith and belief? I mean, if she (the pastor’s kid) doesn’t have it, who does? Sam’s sense of loneliness, abandonment, and her sense of wanting more hit a home run with the opening lines of the book.
“The whole world is wilting. Shriveling. Giving up. Dying. Maybe not the whole world. Somewhere, I guess, it’s not ninety-one degrees at four in the morning. I would like to be in that place. I would like to be somewhere, anywhere, that life feels possible and not smothered under a layer of heat and hopelessness.”
We learn that Sam (Samara) used to really believe in miracles. Then all these bad things seemed to happen to the people in her family. When a young girl from her church, someone she had seen just the day before, is kidnapped, she is convinced that the rift in the world that she had been feeling for months is real. And from the edge of that rift, she is falling. It is the thing that throws Sam’s lack of faith into a tailspin. If she needed a miracle before, now there was no question.
How Sam goes through each day - trying to build a better garden, trying to hang out with friends who want to know what has happened to her mother, trying not to be suspicious of the youth group leader’s relationship with her dad – strikes a chord with readers as this could be any one of us.
Zarr does an amazing job at portraying the tension of the town. Who do you trust after an event like this one? If Sam’s faith is in question, who does she ask for help or guidance? Who can she trust? Who can she talk to? This is an extraordinary book about an ordinary gal trying to understand how all the puzzle pieces of life fit together.
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