Lost It (review)

The "It" in the title is exactly what you'd think: Tess Whistle starts junior year with a crush on handsome newcomer Ben Easter, and by Christmas vacation she has lost her virginity to him under a canoe at his parents' vacation cabin. En route to that fateful day, Tess is left behind by her parents when a midlife crisis takes them wilderness trekking in Utah; she's deprived of her best friend, Zena, after a modestly violent act of rebellion gets Zena sent away to an aunt's; she's got Ben convinced she's a diabetic; and her car collides with a moose, totaling both moose and car and leaving Tess the worse for wear. As a narrator, Tess manages both a snappily humorous style (Zena "confused the fact that she didn't like to wear underpants with the notion that she'd make a good anarchist") and sympathetic frailty with her desperation to be liked by Ben and her fear of everything wild (a problem for an Idaho girl). While the story feels, save for one out-of-the-blue mention of an mp3, like it's set a decade or so ago (and the book's plagued with uncaught misspellings), the feelings are contemporarily credible, and the trajectory of the relationship, from startup to culmination to breakup, rings true. Secondary and tertiary characters are colorfully drawn (except for Ben himself, who's mostly just nice), but there's genuine emotion, not just broad farce, in Tess' story of loving and losing. Readers who relished Susan Juby's Alice, I Think (BCCB 9/03) will likely enjoy Tess' wry account of a girl's first lust and love.