3.5/5 stars

This is a short read but packed full of relatable themes of womanhood with more emphasis on motherhood as well as generational trauma. The author did such a profound job of provoking my thoughts and inner psyche throughout the book- that was a disconcerting but amazing read, and it left me with a lasting impression, for weeks, and maybe a long time. The book can be overwhelming or not, depending on the reader's background or stage of life upon encountering it. Many may bypass the book's actual strengths; for example Leda's decision on "abandoning" her daughters. I see the reasoning behind her decision, and it is that brutal honesty that makes me, as a reader, uncomfortable (it should) but it needs to be discussed more, and the author did a remarkable job extending that so eloquently.

Equal parts validating and triggering—though short, “The Lost Daughter” is not an easy read by any means. I found myself having to pause often, to process and reflect on my own similarities to Leda’s character. Leda’s perspective as a mother isn’t one we hear often, and so it’s quite natural to be taken aback by her candid confessions.

“Her gaze had pulled back abruptly, but without losing me: it had only retreated, as if seeking a distant point, in the depths of her pupils, from which to look at me without risk.”

“The Lost Daughter” is a mirror, and as indicated by the vitriol present in many reviews, the average reader lacks the capacity to see their reflection in it without balking as Nina did, making rash judgements of Leda’s character with little consideration beyond their own discomfort, or rather, their fear of being persecuted for the same transgressions they’re now condemning Leda.

“All the more reason, then, to wonder why I had confessed what was so much my own to strangers, people very different from me, who would therefore never be able to understand my reasons, and who surely, at that moment, were speaking ill of me.”

I believe those who judge Leda’s character as cruel and disturbed have yet to touch the darker places that inhabit their own psyches. I believe, like Nina, they’ve seen a quality in Leda that mirrors something in themselves they’d rather go on pretending isn’t there—understandably so, as we know what happens when women tell the truth, the harsh critiques of Leda’s character being one such example. But I’ve touched those places and I’ve come to the conclusion that, yes, raising children is important, noble even, and it is vital and so very necessary to the continuity of the human race, but no, it isn’t beautiful. It is deeply and profoundly soul-breaking—as Leda says, a shattering—and not everyone can make something vibrant and new out of their broken pieces.

I see a fractured woman—Leda, Nina, myself, even—trying despite our desperate desire to be good mothers, to reconcile the contempt and ambivalence we feel toward children—as everyone so often reminds us—we chose to have. But in a world that recognizes a woman as a lesser, incomplete being unless and until she fractures herself irreparably in motherhood, was it ever really a choice?

“The Lost Daughter” explores the answer to this question, through recollections of childhood trauma and implicit criticisms of the societal expectations placed on women, if one can look past the fear of their own reflection long enough to see it.

“In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.” — Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé