The Lovely and the Lost

By Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Reviewed by Lucille Rose

This action thriller follows SAR dog trainer Kira bennet and her adoptive family as they begin the hunt for a girl lost in the American wilderness. Kira’s life is split it two, it has been since the day she set foot out of that forest. But the wilderness never left her, not really. When Kira was a child, she was forced to brave the unforgiving harshness of the wilderness, doing anything she could to survive, before being rescued by SAR dog trainer, Cady Bennett.

Cady raised her from a savage child to a normal teenager. But no matter how long she’s lived between four walls instead of lying on tree roots under the canopy, she’s never quite come back. No matter how much Cady and Jude, her adoptive family, try to free her from the memory of it. Then Cady’s estranged father shows up on their doorstop, pleading for help in the search for a missing girl. Now, in the small town of Hunter’s Point, Kira isn’t just searching for nine-year-old Bella Anthony, but the truth about her own past.

I had high hopes of this standalone, being a fan of the authors previous serious, The Inheritance Games. But it turns out those hopes were placed on a shaky foundation.

While together, the characters were a testament to the author’s writing skills, but individually they fell a bit short. The relationship between the main teens of the novel, (or should I say, miscreants) was amusing, and kept me engaged even when the plot was failing. The protagonist, Kira Bennett was…. strange, and represents a toxic female stereotype that has poisoned the young adult genre in recent years. In an attempt to remind the reader about Kira’s childhood surviving in the wilderness, the author gave her overt animalistic qualities that were at times startling. I understand that the author has paramount experience in  psychology and would have done research into the psyche of feral children but given the demographic she was aiming this book toward, this knowledge didn’t translate well to the reader.

Kira, while she was a strong female lead, perpetuates sexist standards that young female readers shouldn’t be exposed to. She often remarks about how she regularly skips meals, and is then shown doing extreme, strenuous exercise, all the while maintaining a perfect, Barbie-like figure.  This is the farthest thing from realistic, and even farther from healthy, and I would urge authors to abandon this myth when writing female characters. Jude, the brother, provided the comic relief that was at times, cringy. Free, the best friend, was almost annoyingly perfect, but I understand that the main purposes of their archetypes were to balance out the morose persona of Kira, and they did that job credibly.

The concept this book was intriguing and unique but supported by a flimsy plot and anticlimactic finish. The storyline resembled a bunch of stringy, inconsistent pieces of evidence that ended in a underwhelming finish. There were random sub plots that were painted in excruciating detail, only to be completely forgotten by the end. And the sub plots that were shed the least light on suddenly became hugely important in the final chapters. The ‘big reveal’ was underwhelming and the antagonists’ reasons for the mayhem they caused were weak and insubstantial.

Overall, I’d rate this one out of five stars, for readers thirteen to fifteen. Warning: this book contains mentions of abuse, kidnapping and child abandonment.

Penguin 2025

Jennifer Lynn Barnes