The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel

4.5 stars. Weaving back and forth in time, The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate is a captivating novel that is based on factual events. In 1875, freedwoman Hannie Gossett is living on the plantation where she was enslaved and working hard to fulfill the sharecropping contract. Fearing her former mistress will destroy the contract, Hannie follows the owner’s daughter Lavinia Gossett and Lavinia’s Creole half sister Juneau Jane in order to protect her land. Emancipation may have freed her, but Hannie is well aware of the risks she is facing on what soon becomes a perilous journey. Needing time for Lavinia and Juneau Jane to recover from a harrowing ordeal, the trio find shelter in a hidden Negro church. While staying there, the life-altering discovery of the Lost Friend ads in the Southwestern Christian Advocate gives hope Hannie hope that she will find her long missing family. As Hannie, Lavinia and Juneau Jane search for the sisters’ missing father, they begin collecting more Lost Friend ads as their journey continues. In 1987, Benedetta “Benny” Silva is the new English teacher at a poverty stricken, overcrowded school in Augustine, LA. Despairing of engaging her students, she stumbles onto an innovative idea that inspires her class to investigate the long forgotten yet all important past. With the help of family maverick Nathan Gossett, Benny has located long hidden documents that detail his family’s unpalatable history. Benny is excited about the prospect of bringing her students’ stories to life, but she meets resistance from the school board and the wealthy Gossett family who would rather keep their sordid stories from the public eye. Although initially a little slow paced, both story arcs are extremely fascinating. Hannie, Lavinia and Juneau Jane’s travels are richly detailed and paint an unvarnished portrait of life after the Civil War. The inclusion of original Lost Friend ads offers a horrifying and poignant glimpse of the buying and selling of slaves. Benny’s storyline highlights the importance of family history and the stories that are handed down from one generation to the next. The two story arcs eventually intersect in unexpected but important ways. The Book of Lost Friends is a riveting novel that shines a much needed light on an important part of American history. The characters are three-dimensional, well-developed and appealing. From the wild and dangerous Texas frontier to the hardscrabble life in Augustine, LA in the present, Lisa Wingate brings this heartfelt and emotional story vibrantly to life. A multi-faceted and educational part of history that I absolutely loved and highly recommend. I received a complimentary copy for review.

Heartwrenching and beautiful, this story touched on so many emotions. Parallel stories in post-Civil War south and a young teacher in the 80s. We follow three young women looking for family and property deeds and legal papers. During the search, they find themselves in danger and not knowing whom to trust. Along the way, they discover "Lost Friends" posts in papers and document many former enslaved people searching for family. Finding family and uncovering truths leads to many secrets. A young teacher, thrust into a classroom where children segregate themselves by class and color, tries to find a way to engage them with limited resources, children forgotten with lack of funding. Her project to get the children interested in their community, the past, and history, stirs up the surrounding area. What they uncover will forever change many and connect the dots to a part of history some would prefer to ignore. Hannie and Benny show us history cannot be swept away. This book serves to open eyes, hearts, and minds with understanding while educating us on a forgotten history in our country. May the stories not be forgotten, the names not left unuttered. **received an ARC from the publisher**

THE BOOK OF LOST FRIENDS is a family saga about black and white relationships and connections in post Civil War America, that also connects with people living in the same area a hundred years later. Extremely engaging! What ties everyone together is their connection to an old plantation at Goswood Grove in the small town of Augustine, Louisiana: • One part of the story takes place in 1875. Slavery has ended though the lives of former enslaved people have changed little. With vastly different motivations, three brave women from the plantation must embark on a challenging trip to the Texas frontier, to find some important legal papers relating to the heir to the property. They are NOT friends, though they have longstanding ties. How do three women travel safely over such a long distance? How do they figure out who among the many people they encounter can be trusted? And do they have the smarts to even get to their destination? And how will their relationships with one another evolve? • A second part of the story involves young teacher Benedeta Silva, just beginning her teaching career in a very poor, small town public school with few resources and distinctly unmotivated students. How can she possibly figure out a way to engage them in their school work? Would accessing the vast library at Goswood Grove help? Can she expect, as an outsider, to ever be accepted into this tightly knit society of haves and have nots? And why is there such resistance to her enthusiasm around helping her students? I have written in other reviews about my annoyance at what I consider a much overused device in contemporary historical fiction — i.e. authors writing multiple storylines that move back and forth in time and only connect at the very end of the book. So often, the technique seems to do little more than add confusion. But this is one novel where Lisa Wingate skillfully employs that very device. AND it makes sense. Her two story threads are easy to follow and clearly connected by the US history of slavery, which continues to impact all of us today. Central to that connection is a fascinating publication I knew nothing about —the “lost friends” ads that were placed in a Methodist newspaper, The Southwestern Advocate. For decades, placing ads in this publication (which were then read aloud during church services) was one of the only ways former enslaved people had to try to locate family members who had been sold off years before, during the period of slavery. And actual excerpts that the author sprinkles throughout the novel are both dramatic and powerful, offering a glimpse into the pain and desperation so many black Americans experienced.