I picked up 'The Lost Girl' because I'd enjoyed Sangu Mandanna's novel, 'The Very Secret Society Of Irregular Witches' (2022). It provided a wonderful comfort read that was optimistic and uplifting without being light and frothy. I loved that Sangu Mandanna made a story about preserving identity and community in the face of difference and exclusion feel so personal and relatable so I took a look at her back catalogue a picked out her debut novel, published ten years before 'The Very Secret Society Of Irregular Witches' in 2012.

After reading the first few chapters, I was impressed and puzzled. Impressed at how compelling and immersive the book was. Puzzled at why it seems to be relatively unknown. By the end of the book, I was certain that 'The Lost Girl' deserves a much bigger audience.

It's a kind of science fiction that I like: an exploration of what it means to be human and non-human that goes beyond a thought experiment into a lived experience that challenged me to consider what I would do in the same circumstances.

In a way, 'The Lost Girl' is a re-imagining of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' from the point of view of the Creature Frankenstein created and abandoned. Forget the Frankenstein's Monster movie tropes and go back to the Mary Shelley original that showed Frankenstein as the one with an ego monstrous enough to believe he had the right to create life and who felt no qualms abandoning the Creature he'd created when it didn't live up to his expectations. Now imagine being that Creature. What would you want from your creators?

Sangu Manna imagines two 'lost girls' in her novel: Amarra, a young woman living in Bangalore in India, loved by her family and her friends, who is lost to them in a fatal accident when she is sixteen years old, and Eva, an Echo commissioned by Amarra's parents to be a receptacle for Amarra's soul in the event of her death. From childhood, Amara has had to journal every moment of her life, every event, every photograph, every book and every friend and share it with an Echo of herself that she's never met. Eva has spent sixteen years in the care of people who have trained her to memorise every aspect of Amarra's life while Eva lives in seclusion in the English Lake District, with almost no life of her own, waiting to see if she'll ever be needed.

The story is told from Eva's perspective and after I'd read only ten per cent of the book, I was already heavily invested in Eva's well-being, an investment that only increased after Eva moved to Bangalore and I saw her chances of survival decreasing day by day.

I loved how personal this book felt. I believed in and liked Eva. Which, of course, meant that I saw the man who created her and made her continued existence subject to the whims of others, as the inhuman one. Yet, Eva's creator, Matthew is not an irredeemable narcissistic megalomaniac. He's a genius who has had too much power for way too long until his empathy, never one of his strengths, has been almost completely eroded and his sense of entitlement knows no limits. And yet, he still takes an interest in Eva. His 'interest' might help her or doom her but it's there.

Amarra's family, who become Eva's family and whom she has studied from afar via Amarra's journals her whole life, was drawn with skill and empathy. I liked them and I hated the situation that they found themselves in.

I liked the idea that The Loom, the powerful and secretive London-based institution that 'wove' Eva and which makes and owns all Echoes worldwide, is two hundred years old and so would have come into being about the time that Mary Shelley published 'Frankenstein'. That Echoes are illegal in India but legal in England was a nice touch, giving a nod to the imperial arrogance of the British.

The book spans a period of two years, at the start of which Eva is sixteen. She's also led a very sheltered life with only supervised access to media and with her social contact limited mainly to her carers. Telling the story from her point of view gives the book a Young Adult feel but I don't see this as a Young Adult book. I think it's a piece of Speculative Fiction that would work for Young Adults but is also an immersive and challenging experience for people like me who've been adults for a long time.

The plot is well-structured, the world-building works, the ethical challenges are complex, there's a strong sense of threat, a lot of tension and moments of high drama. When all of that is combined with characters that I care about, what's not to like?

The ending of the book wasn't the explosive finale that I'd been expecting. Like the rest of the book, it was believable and surprising and left me wondering what I would have done. ( )

When I first started looking for speculative fiction by non-white authors, this book was on several lists as one to read. And rightly so - it blew me away. I suppose, technically, it's a young adult book, but I didn't realize that until I was finished, and this book clearly exemplifies that YA can tackle complex and philosophical issues.

Like, what makes somebody human? What makes somebody an individual?

Eva is an echo, a clone-like being who is created for the sole purpose of replacing their other in the event the other dies, allowing for a type of immortality. Eva's other is Amarra, an Indian girl. When Amarra dies in a car accident, Eva is forced to give up her the life she knows to take on Amarra's life. Despite dedicating her life previously with learning everything about Amarra's, she finds that becoming Amarra is difficult. If she slips up and people find out she's an echo, she would be destroyed and her other's family imprisoned. If she acts unlike Amarra, the Loom which makes echos can unmake -- kill -- her.

There is a lot crammed into this book and it's not readily apparent until you sit back and think through it all.

I look forward to anything the author writes in the future. ( )

Very much a YA novel, whether you like this book will be driven by your opinion of protagonist, Eva. Eva is an "echo," created to take the place of a girl named Amarra, who Eva would replace if Amarra should ever die so her family will not have to suffer loss of a loved one. How Eva is created by the mysterious "Weavers" could have been better developed. Amarra keeps a journal, which is studied by Eva, but Eva is homeschooled and kept hidden since she is not fully human. Amarra dies, and Eva does her best to replace her, but Amarra's family and friends know or learn the truth. There is the usual teenage drama over boys Eva likes and Amarra likes. In the end though, I liked Eva's spunkiness and independence. ( )

This was SO GOOD and I cannot wait for the next in the series. ( )

All the reasons why I enjoyed this are probably also the reasons it doesn't seem to have set the world on fire. From the book description I sort of expected a standard-ish YA book about a girl against the system, about identity and choice, probably with a love triangle of the old environment's boy versus the new environment's boy. But it's actually a lot more complicated, more about grief and conforming to expectation, responsibility and self-determination. The heroine is noted as "reckless", but I found her far more sensible, introspective and aware than I'm used to in a YA heroine (so it was really interesting to watch her wrestle with her impossible situations). And that love triangle is a far murkier thing.

It wasn't all wine and roses. There are some brow-furrowing elements of the world. Some aspects of the Loom's operation seem logistically impossible (my major concern being how on earth do you have short-haired echoes, of either gender, when they must not reveal what they are, but they're all marked on the back of the neck?) and the Weavers throughout manifested an "ineffable immortals playing games with the lives of men" that never quite came through in genuine plot intrigue. But I feel like this was meant to be a series and sadly never got to be, so perhaps those things would've been unravelled further if given space.

Probably more like three-and-a-half, rounded up because I'm generally feeling benevolent towards this book. ( )