Product Description

Since the publication of her astonishing debut Vanished, Mary McGarry Morris has been compared with John Steinbeck and Carson McCullers and widely praised as "one of our finest American writers" (The Miami Herald). Now Morris has achieved new heights with her riveting chronicle of the Talcotts, a family in rural Vermont during the Great Depression.

Abandoned by his beautiful wife, Henry and their two young children spend a summer in a tent on the edge of Black Pond. As he searches for work, Henry often must leave the children alone. When a prosperous neighbor intervenes, the consequences may cost the Talcotts everything. Powerfully imagined and intensely felt, The Lost Mother is a haunting masterpiece and McGarry Morris’s strongest novel to date.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #116438 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-10
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
"They said it was bad for everyone, but nobody else the boy knew had to live in the woods." Thus begins the harrowing story of 12-year-old Thomas and eight-year-old Margaret in Morris's powerful sixth novel. Reduced to living in a tent in Vermont during the Depression, the children and their father, Henry Talcott, a butcher who must travel daily seeking work, are barely surviving their abandonment by the children's reluctant mother. The shattered family aches with the desire to bring home beautiful, troubled Irene while Henry crumbles into a "whipped man... worn down and grim," and Thomas takes on the role of caretaker. Henry's longtime friend Gladys shows the family rare kindness, but a longstanding animosity between her crotchety father and Henry makes it impossible for the Talcotts to accept her charity. In typical Morris fashion, the author paints a brutal landscape and authentic characters with delicacy and precision: from the chaotic household of Irene's alcoholic sister to the creepy relationship between a sick boy and his doting mother, who wants to adopt Thomas and Margaret. Never one to shy away from the messy and bleak, Morris (Songs in Ordinary Time; Vanished) unflinchingly illuminates the bitter existence of neglected children and their inspiring resilience, once again proving herself a storyteller of great compassion, insight and depth.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Abandoned by their mother and bankrupted out of their home, Thomas, 11, and Margaret, 8, are forced to grow up too quickly, surviving hand-to-mouth with their father in a tent in Vermont's woods during the Great Depression. While the man does his best to care for their physical needs, he is too besieged by worries about survival to spare any tenderness. The children are convinced that their mother will return, and their continued hopefulness and loyalty to her is perhaps the most heartbreaking element of this tale. As much as this is a story about Thomas and Margaret, it is also about the ways in which severe hardships bring out extremes in human nature. Irene fails her children most tragically, but they are let down more subtly by most of the other adults with whom they are involved. Morris's stark language evokes the loneliness and disconnectedness of two children desperately trying to find their way back to their mother, only to face her rejection a second time. All is not lost, however: amid the grasping self-centeredness that dominates many of the characters, one person redeems himself and offers the youngsters the acceptance and compassion they have missed for so long. Painstaking detail provides richness and a valuable history lesson on 1930s America. The central themes of resiliency and hope are a good reminder that even when individuals or communities feel that they have no control over their circumstances, it is their response to those circumstances that makes all the difference.–Kim Dare, Fairfax County Public Library System, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
This is a perfectly lovely book about perfectly awful things.

Eleven-year-old Thomas Talcott and his little sister Margaret have been abandoned by their mother. The Great Depression is under way; their father has lost his farm and most of his livelihood as an itinerant cattle-butcher. Homeless and hungry, the Talcotts are living in a tent. And a long Vermont winter is coming on.

A couple of chapters into The Lost Mother, you are inclined to think, well, at least things can't get any worse. But there you fail to reckon with Mary McGarry Morris's prodigious talents as a weaver of intimate, emotionally intense and unrelenting narratives. We watch through the lens of young Thomas's dawning awareness as events pile up, the large tumbling upon the small.

The boy gets in trouble with the local sheriff after being cheated by a greedy store-owner. The father's search for gainful employment is stymied by one minor calamity after another. In an irruption of childish rage, Thomas drowns his sister's kitten. And then the land on which the family's tent is pitched gets sold out from under them.

Okay, that's enough, let it end, you think. Give the poor kids a break. But it doesn't end, and the reader is dragged along like a figure in a nightmare, able to see full well what is going to happen, yet powerless to intervene.

What makes the narrative bearable -- indeed often quite beautiful -- is Morris's wonderfully limpid prose and her sympathetic treatment of all of her characters, even the ones who are really, really hard to like.

Morris has been compared to Steinbeck, and aptly so, but there is a fair dose of Dickens here too, especially in her depiction of these children and their plight, which is sometimes witty, sometimes harrowing, but never condescending or romanticized:

"Margaret's shoes hurt worse than ever. She had grown a lot over the summer, but nowhere was it more apparent and painful than her longer feet crammed each morning into tight shoes that rubbed her heels and big toes raw. All summer long she'd gone barefoot, but now with the cold and the walk to school she had to wear the only shoes she had. Margaret begged for new ones. Be patient, her father said. Next month after he had enough saved to move them into the house he'd bring her into town for the best pair a girl ever had. What about me? Thomas wanted to ask. His own were lined with paper and cloth, cardboard, anything he could salvage to keep from walking on bare ground. Because the bottoms of his socks had worn out, he had cut them off, but still put on the tops every morning so he'd at least look like he had socks on."

In their jolting, comfortless journey through the world, Thomas and Margaret are mostly left to their own devices, obliged to slog onward as best they can. Their story-arc spirals downward into a sort of picaresque Purgatorio. Fleeing from one false haven to the next, sustained by fading memory and illusory hope, the children become ever more deeply enmeshed in complicated grown-up affairs they understand imperfectly, at best.

This is not a coming-of-age story, properly speaking. But there are episodes of unsettling discovery. When the children find their mother at last, things turn out quite differently than they had hoped. One afternoon she entertains a gentleman caller while the kids, adjured to silence, huddle breathlessly upstairs. Margaret asks her brother:

" 'What's that?'

" 'Something, I don't know.' He dangled over the musty mattress, listening, straining to hear the not unfamiliar rhythmic struggle that was more vibration now than sound to his blood-pulsing ears.

" 'Is that him? Is he laughing?' Margaret asked.

" 'No.'

"Voices gone, all sound ceased. Something cold and dagger-sharp hung in the air. If he moved it would destroy everything. There was only uneasiness, that moment of revelation when all is understood though nothing is known. Yes. Of course. But what? The violation was too vast. It changed everything."

If the Devil is in the details, Morris is a fiend for specificity. Fine-brushed images glow on every page. The letter in a lost mother's handwriting, ink smeared, hidden in a tobacco pouch behind a box of rusted cans. The old man's waxy yellow skin and painful wheezing that, "instead of being pitiable . . . was repulsive, creepy the way it emphasized the great effort it took to wage such cruelty." The vase of withered roses, brown petals fallen to the tabletop, the water brackish and cloudy. From a thousand such tiny strands, convincing in their very banality, the delicate fabric of this novel is woven.

Morris's plot, with its twists and reversals (too many and too exciting to recount here), feels tragic in its inevitability. And yet, to the reader's amazement, its message is ultimately redemptive and affirming. This may be the saddest story ever to have a happy ending. It surely is the quietest, subtlest novel that ever kept me up into the small hours of the night, unable to look away.

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

Customer Reviews

Amazing
Amazing. I got this book from a friend of mine who owns a bookstore and who knows I am a fan of Mary McGarry Morris. I just finished it and felt compelled to post this review, because the book was so powerful. A real tug at - and from - the heart. I couldn't put it down. Like all Mary McGarry Morris' characters, these characters got so stuck in my head that I'm still hearing their voices. The pacing is breathtaking, often suspenseful. The story is haunting. The writing is beautiful. The character of Henry Talcott is an American classic, as I think this book is destined to be. The Talcott children, Thomas and Margaret, seemed so real that I ached for them in their search. Gladys, old Bibeau, Jesse-boy, the Farleys, Aunt Lena, Sister Mary Christopher, are all fabulous characters and very believable because of the depth and precision of their portrayals. I think "THE LOST MOTHER" is most like "VANISHED", Mary McGarry Morris' first novel which was nominated for major literary prizes (and which before this was my favorite novel by the author). "THE LOST MOTHER" and "VANISHED" share a simple tone and lyrical voice that make both books flow. In the end, it is a haunting melody, a joy to read, and tremendous on all fronts.

In the name of love


It is the nature of childhood to view the world from an innocent perspective. When Irene Talcott abandons her husband and two children, Henry Talcott must leave eight year-old Margaret and twelve year-old Thomas with whatever family can temporarily care for them. Margaret is gregarious, with a constant need for attention, but her brother is not prepared to assume the role of mother. This Vermont family shoulders a familiar burden in the years of Great Depression, beset with the constant threat of poverty and homelessness.

Leaving Margaret and Thomas at the homes of relatives, friends and neighbors until each becomes unbearable, the small family is faced with insurmountable problems: Gladys Bibeau loves the children, more than willing to help her lifelong friend Henry, but her senile father demands all of his daughter's attentions, jealous even of the children; Aunt Lena and Uncle Max depend upon Lena's income as a hairdresser to support them, her clientele become scarce as her daily drinking alienates even her husband and puts brother and sister in jeopardy; Mr. Farley, now the owner of the Talcott's farm, is happy to see Henry in reduced circumstances, but his wife, Phyllis, covets the charming and pretty Margaret, scheming for custody of the girl, while barely tolerating Thomas. The Farley's crippled son, fifteen year-old Jesse-boy, is delighted with the prospect of Margaret living in his house, his curiosity about the opposite sex bordering on the deviant.

The children's naiveté contrasts sharply with the self-serving hypocrisy of Phillis Farley, a woman who sacrifices their fragile innocence for the satiety of her broken son, his mind as distorted as his invalid body. The good intentions of Morris' complex characters are warped by their selfish motives and innate lack of compassion, as the author deftly exposes the indifference of a bureaucratic system blinded to its own inadequacies. Brother and sister still reeling from the loss of their mother in this classic battle of good and evil, the ill-intentioned masquerade in sheep's clothing. Even in the most extreme conditions, Thomas and Margaret never lose faith in their father's love for them. Their mother, the beautiful Irene, is deeply flawed, yet even she is sympathetic, driven by longing for a better life than her marriage offers, crippled by guilt but incapable of giving her children the emotional security they deserve.

Stunningly imagined, this chilling tale is consistently fraught with tension, the human condition this author's forte. It is impossible to imagine more frightening circumstances than those the Talcott children endure in the name of love, clinging to their faith in the one man who may avert a fate to terrible to bear. This extraordinary novel never misses a beat, rolling like a freight train towards its shocking conclusion, a novel that will not be quickly forgotten. Like the desperate boy and girl in The Night of the Hunter, Thomas and Margaret leave a lasting impression on the reader, a compelling glimpse into the dark heart of an indifferent fate. Luan Gaines/2005.

Can't Put Down
I literally could not put this book down and have continued to think of the characters after finishing the book. If you like
Elizabeth Berg or Kaye Gibbons, you will love this book. Excellent read!