Product Description

For nearly two decades, since the publication of her iconic first novel, The Good Mother, Sue Miller has distinguished herself as one of our most elegant and widely celebrated chroniclers of family life, with a singular gift for laying bare the interior lives of her characters. In each of her novels, Miller has written with exquisite precision about the experience of grace in daily life–the sudden, epiphanic recognition of the extraordinary amid the ordinary–as well as the sharp and unexpected motions of the human heart away from it, toward an unruly netherworld of upheaval and desire. But never before have Miller’s powers been keener or more transfixing than they are in Lost in the Forest, a novel set in the vineyards of Northern California that tells the story of a young girl who, in the wake of a tragic accident, seeks solace in a damaging love affair with a much older man.

Eva, a divorced and happily remarried mother of three, runs a small bookstore in a town north of San Francisco. When her second husband, John, is killed in a car accident, her family’s fragile peace is once again overtaken by loss. Emily, the eldest, must grapple with newfound independence and responsibility. Theo, the youngest, can only begin to fathom his father’s death. But for Daisy, the middle child, John’s absence opens up a world of bewilderment, exposing her at the onset of adolescence to the chaos and instability that hover just beyond the safety of parental love. In her sorrow, Daisy embarks on a harrowing sexual odyssey, a journey that will cast her even farther out onto the harsh promontory of adulthood and lost hope.

With astonishing sensuality and immediacy, Lost in the Forest moves through the most intimate realms of domestic life, from grief and sex to adolescence and marriage. It is a stunning, kaleidoscopic evocation of a family in crisis, written with delicacy and masterful care. For her lifelong fans and those just discovering Sue Miller for the first time, here is a rich and gorgeously layered tale of a family breaking apart and coming back together again: Sue Miller at her inimitable best.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #229057 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-25
• Released on: 2006-07-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Bestseller Miller (The Good Mother; While I Was Gone; etc.) examines love and betrayal in idyllic wine country in another minutely observed, finely paced exploration of domestic relationships. Idealistic California converts Eva and Mark had a solid marriage until Mark's affair; "bumps in matrimony" is what one of Eva's friends, Gracie, calls such difficulties, and as Miller presents them it's not a question of whether they'll appear but how to deal with them when they do. Some years later, Mark and Eva's two adolescent daughters, Emily and Daisy, are living with Eva and her second husband, John, and their young son, Theo. After John's death in a freak accident, Mark rescues the children from their mother's anguish and, in the process, realizes he is still in love with her. John's death becomes the locus of an elegant and careful investigation of loss—loss of love, loss of innocence—and the conflicts between men and women, parents and children, friends and lovers. As Eva grieves and Mark acknowledges his feelings for her, their quiet younger daughter, 15-year-old Daisy (who "had loved [John] the best!"), enters into an affair with an older man. The backdrop of California vineyards is ideal for the growth and life-cycle themes that Miller so carefully cultivates. As Daisy tries her first glass of wine, has her first taste of sex and experiments with her sense of power and voice, she develops into the heroine of the tale—one of the next generation of women learning to navigate the complex familiar waters of love and domesticity.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
It has been said that every good novelist is also a sociologist. Well, if sociologists can be said to shed light on how people must lead their lives at a given time and place in a society, then that statement certainly applies to Sue Miller, who has been providing just that kind of illumination, book to book, since she began her career more than 25 years ago with The Good Mother.

This new novel, Lost in the Forest, begins with a cell phone call to a divorced vintner named Mark from his older daughter, Emily, announcing that he is needed immediately, and that it's an emergency. He drives to his ex-wife Eva's house, and picks up Emily, his younger daughter, Daisy, and Theo, Eva's son from her second marriage. It's Emily who tells him that Theo's father, and the girls' stepfather, John, has been killed in an accident:

" 'How did it happen?' he asked at last, keeping his voice gentle. 'When?'

"She seemed stricken again at the question, her eyes swam and grew larger, but she held on and whispered back, 'This afternoon. A car just . . . hit him.'

"Mark cleared his throat. 'He was driving?'

" 'No.' Her hair swung as she shook her head. 'Walking. With Eva and Theo.'

" 'Jesus. They were with him?' "

The novel turns on this event, while giving forth the past: Mark's infidelity to Eva, their divorce, Eva's marriage to John, the friendship Mark comes to feel for Eva and John, the children's adjustments to changed life -- in other words, the stitching together of this family, with all its fault lines and tremors. When John dies, things shatter again, and the whole process must begin anew. We see into the heart of Eva, worried about the slow recession of her grief, the healing that is taking place within her; we are privy to the longing Mark feels, falling in love with his ex-wife all over again; and we see Daisy, the younger daughter, beginning to realize her power as a woman, experiencing her grief with acts of secret defiance, and finally becoming involved with the husband of her mother's best friend. We follow these strains of narrative back and forth and occasionally even forward, far into the future. For Miller rather daringly jumps forward in time, past the boundaries of the story's time-line.

Here is a passage from a chapter about Daisy and her affair. The man, Duncan, following her on her way home from school, is driving slowly along beside her. "Steering with one hand, his body leaned across the front seat toward her." She sees that it's him and has the thought that she "was sorry she wasn't wearing any lipstick, or a prettier top." The passage continues:

"And with that response came an unconscious dawning of awareness -- awareness of why he was there, and what he was doing, speaking her name, calling her over to him. . . . She understood that he'd come on purpose, that he had thought about her and sought her out.

"Years later when she tried to explain it to Dr. Gerard, she said that it was as though her unconscious mind knew everything that her conscious mind hadn't a clue about yet; and this was the moment when they began to communicate with each other."

This device of leaping years into the future is neither intrusive nor as jarring as it might seem. It is all part of the seamless prose surface Miller has constructed with such artfulness. These passages startle the reader rather wonderfully into a visceral understanding of the essential nature of this fine novel, which is in fact gently comic. For, as we know, comedy in literature stresses the community, and its ongoing life, while tragedy stresses the individual, who is doomed. Lost in the Forest is a comedy in the exact and best literary sense, for it stresses beautifully the continuation of the social unit with which it is concerned. Do I sound like a sociologist? Listen to the novelist, describing her an older Daisy as she rehearses for the part of Miranda in "The Tempest":

"It's the people, she realizes . . . their sheer number and their beauty. The creatures, the mankind: the people! That's where she should put the emphasis, that's what will make it new."

Sue Miller has been making it new now for a long time, and Lost in the Forest is a shining affirmation that her power only continues to grow.

Reviewed by Richard Bausch
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Who needs family therapy when one has Sue Miller? Lost in the Forest expertly unfolds to a display of realistic characters and troubled situations, including the sexual initiation (or violation?) of a teenage girl. Yet Daisy’s affair represents only one of many challenges the family faces after John’s death—and there are no easy answers. In understated, powerful prose, Miller moves back and forth in time, a device critics saw as either artful or interruptive. There were divergent views on the explicit sex as well. In this meditation on love, loss, grief, and self-discovery, Miller successfully and painfully examines what divides, and then unites and re-divides, our familial core.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Warped, Compelling Coming Of Age Tale
First, this confession: it was the beautiful cover of this book that first caught my eye. If ever a book was served by what lies on its cover, it is this one.

Set in the California wine country in the late 1980's, this Sue Miller novel begins in straightforward fashion with the accidental death of a man, then lets the effects of that death cascade downward to set the entire story in motion. This novel tells of fifteen-year-old Daisy and her extended family, and how the life of Daisy and her relatives is changed with the loss of Daisy's stepfather. Ill-healed wounds from the recent past are split open once more amid a plethora of present-day anguish. Daisy and all around her are, to state it simply, changed.

If Lost In The Forest were merely this, it would be an entirely different type of novel, but as most everyone now knows, Miller turns it into something more. What she accomplishes via Daisy's eventual erotic affair with a man nearly forty years her elder, is to explicitly turn out the most daring, taboo-breaking work of fiction since Lolita half a century ago. I avidly followed along behind Daisy in her descent into what is probably best described, even in 2005, as a plummet from grace.

I really feel uncomfortable saying more than this, because there is much lying under the surface of this work and I am afraid of giving details away when you can gain so much more by discovering this story for yourself. What I will conclude with here is that Miller, in this tale of pain and reaction, coming of age, and the making of mistakes, has given us her best work since Family Pictures, and showed not only courage in the story she created, but in making this barely more than a novella, when so many other writers might have yielded to the temptation to bloat this by an unnecessary couple hundred extra pages.

The parallel worlds of grief and love
Time after time, Sue Miller has proven herself a master storyteller, reaching into the heart of a tale and exposing the complicated reactions of a family in crisis. As in Lost in the Forest, no one is ever prepared for tragedy, yet it strikes randomly, altering lives in the wake of grief.

For Eva and her three children, tragedy strikes on a quiet afternoon walk with her second husband, John, and their small son, Theo. John is suddenly struck by a car, killed instantly in front of wife and child. Mark, Eva's first husband, receives a call from seventeen-year old Emily, requesting that he come and get the children, but she doesn't tell him the reason until after they are safely ensconced at his house. Three-year old Theo may be too young to understand, but middle child, almost-fifteen-year old Daisy was particularly close to her stepfather, a gentle man who took the time to attend to her emotional needs. Eva is, of course devastated.

Family and friends grope blindly through the following days in the beautiful Napa Valley wine country of the 1980's, seeking a return to some kind of normalcy and an end to their endless grief, the weight of sorrow almost a physical burden. Time passes and the family returns to a routine, but, of course, nothing is the same for any of them. Over the next few months, Mark imagines a life again with his former wife, although Eva is ambivalent, still reeling from the shocking loss of her beloved John. Aware of Eva's dilemma, Mark can't deny the fantasy that blooms in his imagination.

Emily has begun to move away from the circle of family. The world calls her to her future. Young Theo has yet to comprehend that his father has gone forever, imagining he will see him in heaven soon. Surprisingly, it is Daisy, now fifteen, who suffers the most from John`s absence, the man who had so generously taken over the fatherly role Mark unwittingly abdicated. Given to a natural quiet and isolation, the formerly gawky girl is growing into her beauty, a fact that doesn't go unnoticed by one of their circle, an older married man.

Like moth to flame, the vulnerable Daisy is seduced by the probing voice of experience, the worldly man who finds her so charming, so vulnerable. Open to his flattery, Daisy is transported into a private island of intimacy, an almost physical yearning like a healing balm for the almost fathomless grief she has endured since John's death. The terrible loss too large for her to manage, Daisy escapes into her romantic musings, stepping over the threshold of sexual maturity, still a girl but with the sensory awareness of a woman, unable to locate a moral compass for her burgeoning emotions.

Miller handles the scenes of seduction with incredible grace, perfectly capturing Daisy's innocence, vulnerability and desperate need for comfort; the author's descriptions are weighted with poignancy, a melding of curiosity and satisfaction: "She felt he offered her a new version of herself, one she carried more and more with her into real life." It is Mark and Eva's courage as parents that serves as a catalyst for Daisy's decisions about her relationship with the older man, who is actually a predator, as she will come to see years later. And it is Mark, Daisy's absentee father, who reaches out to his troubled daughter, offering her a healthy future and the promise of her youth.

From a tangled web of emotional chaos, Miller creates a family in crisis who must learn to recover, adapt and make peace with the unalterable past, anchored by the overwhelming love of parent for child and the gift of forgiveness. Luan Gaines/2005.

Recommended with reservations..
IMHO, this is one of Miller's better books. The characters are all ring true, and the tale is told in an interesting way.

Summary, no spoilers:

Eva and Mark had two children, named Emily and Daisy. When the girls were small, Mark has an affair, and the marriage ends.

Eva remarries John ("a nice guy"), and has a son, Theo, with him.

When the book opens, we discover that John has been killed in a car accident (he was a pedestrian), and everyone is feeling enormous grief.

The book tells the story of that grief, and how each character deals with life without John.

Mark now becomes a more vital part of the family's life, Eva deals with loneliness, and Daisy, 14 years old and the most troubled, deals with her grief, her alienation from other kids, and her burgeoning sexuality.

This is a quick read. As usual, Miller is entertaining, and in particular, in this novel she has created a realistic group of characters.

The only reservation I have is with the ending of this book. Miller's last chapter takes place well after the events of the book, and it does resolve a lot of questions as to what happens to the various characters. It is just my opinion, but I would have preferred a different ending. It was a bit of a letdown for me, and I felt like I was meeting different characters than the ones I had come to know intimately throughout the novel.

Despite this, Lost in the Forest is a very good book, and I highly recommended it.