For readers of "Beautiful Boy" and "Hurry Down Sunshine" comes a deeply personal and moving account of two lost children separated by two centuries.

Reviews

Novelist Myerson (Something Might Happen) made headlines in the UK with this memoir about two tragic young adults. The first is Mary Yelloly, whose 19th-century album of watercolors enchants Myerson, partly because the artist died at 21. Simultaneously, and more interestingly, Myerson recounts her son's addiction to skunk, a particularly potent version of marijuana, seesawing between tough love and familial embrace. At times, Mary's history is a welcome relief from the addiction thread, but these passages often feel jarringly quaint and irrelevant. The final scene reads like an ill-advised attempt to bring a tidy end to an untidy situation. A mixed bag that might appeal to literary-minded parents navigating a child's drug problems.-Amelia Brunskill, Liaison Librarian for the Sciences, Dickinson Coll., Carlisle, PA Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

In this difficult, unsettling memoir, English novelist (Sleepwalking) Myerson attempts a tricky bifurcated journey between two lives, past and present. Clearly, the author began with the intent of tracing the obscure life and work of a 19th-century artist, Mary Yelloly, who had once lived in Myerson's town of Suffolk and died of tuberculosis at age 21, in 1838. The author was given some of Yelloly's watercolors and proceeded to research the extended family as well as uncover where Mary was buried in the nearby Woodton churchyard. However, another life crisis pressed to the forefront: that of her oldest son, who at 17 began to exhibit bizarrely aggressive behavior from smoking "cannabis," driving his parents to despair and the painful decision to kick him out of their home. Myerson's memoir, while erecting the elaborate and frequently tedious genealogy of the Yelloly and Suckling clans, on the one hand, is utterly overrun and undermined by the stunning cruelty of the very real teenager (e.g., selling drugs to his little brother, ignoring the pregnancy of his girlfriend, punching his mother), on the other. The whole effect of Victorian portraits and letters, details of the cringing servility with which Myerson and her husband deal with their son and memories of the author's own teenage rupture with her father makes for a surreally touching textual kaleidoscope. (Sept.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

“"The Lost Child" is a cry for help and a plea for a clear acknowledgment of the toll this drug is taking on our children. [It] will appeal to readers of David Sheff’s "Beautiful Boy "but that’s not enough. These are books for all parents, no matter what shape they think their children are in. Indeed, these books are for anyone interested in public policy relating to drugs. Why would we choose not to see what’s happening all around us?  Books like these signal the beginning of awareness. And the beginning of hope that we can do right by our children.”"—New York Times Book Review"

“A surreally touching textual kaleidoscope.”"—Publishers Weekly"

“Julie Myerson has written a fascinating, searching book about the messy limits of love that manages to be both historical and achingly contemporary.”—Michael Greenberg, author of "Hurry Down Sunshine"