The Book of Lost Friends, Lisa Wingate

I have had a multi-day book hangover with this one (a great thing), and I can say this is a first in a very long time that I cannot seem to pick up another book - I don't want any of these feelings to dissipate.

I do not read books based on trend or hype, or season; the fact that I read The Book of Lost Friends during Black History Month was purely coincidental.

The Book of Lost Friends was developed as a suggestion, if you will, to the author by one of her readers. The reader had just finished another of Ms. Wingate's amazing historical fictions, and as she was volunteering to input letters from lost friends into a database, she thought Ms. Wingate might find inspiration in the same. And boy, did she!

Written from two POVs, The Book of Lost Friends finds the reader in the 1870s with Hannie Gossett, an 18-year-old newly freed slave who sets out on a quest even she didn't know she was about to embark on, and in the 1980s with late-20s Benny Silva, a first-year teacher way out of her depth, culture, and understanding in Augustine, Louisianna.

Hannie begins her journey thinking she will collect intel on what the young mistress of the house and her half-sister (a mullato girl that shares in common the mistress' father) learn of their father's papers regarding his land holdings. But this quickly turns into a quest for Hannie to find her own people who were ripped away from each other through slave trading.

Benny only needs to do five years in an underprivileged school to get her student loans paid for; little did she know when she signed up to the mixed race, heavily black populated school, that she would not only save her students by helping them uncover their pasts but that she would find comfort of her own in understanding the way a past shapes the present.

The stories don't intertwine per se (until one line toward the end when you realize that Ms. Silva's students have uncovered the history of Hannie Gossett), but the 'big house' where the Gossets, both black and white, all came from, anchor it.

The stories of both Hannie and Benny stand alone and are remarkably well-told in their own right. But the over-arching theme of humanity, unforgivable family secrets (slavery), and the absolute need to preserve history, including all of its ugliness, strikes a chord that is hard to shake.

I struggle to articulate this book's uniqueness because I am still in my head. Suffice to say, it is an absolute MUST READ. If we bury our heads regarding the past, we risk allowing the past to reoccur.

Thank you, Ms. Wingate, for allowing me to join Hannie and Benny on their quest for truth. This book makes me want to dive deeply into the bunny trail of lost friends.