salreads 's review for:

Lost Property by Helen Paris

3.0

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This is the story of Dot who works in the lost property office. She lives alone, in a maisonette eating tinned soup. Dot’s Mother has dementia and has been moved into a care home, Dot’s sister Phillippa is married with kids. Phillippa wants to find Dot a husband, to sell the maisonette which was their mother’s and find Dot a more reputable job. Lost Property has become Dot’s life - uniting various objects, clothing, baggage with their owners her mission. Dot’s life is unravelling. Changes are afoot at work and her home may be sold, some nights she doesn’t leave the office and increasingly she is haunted by events from the past and her father’s death.
There is so much of this story that I loved. I loved the descriptions of the objects, the sense of their belonging beyond simple ownership, the way they defined their owner. I loved the relationship between Phillippa and her sister. Dot feels that Phillippa has always owned the older sister role, humiliated her as a child. Phillippa and Dot disagree about how to support their Mother. Dot feels that she was the ‘mistake’. I loved the strong sense of the family - the two little girls, the Mum who used to sing on stage and now sings over the washing, the Father who retreats into his imagination, who loves to create adventures, who loves their uncle, who finds this world too hard. The feeling of grief and loss is tangible and the scenes of Dot and her Mother in the care home are beautifully evoked as Dot tries to help her Mother re-connect.

I did feel that the middle section of the book lost its grip on me and I am not entirely sure why but I struggled with the latter half of the book. With thanks to Netgalley and Random House for a digital copy of this book