It’s officially spring break!  It was a beautifully, breezy day so I immediately went to the deck to squeeze in some reading when I got home from work.  I recently won a copy of The Lost Man by Jane Harper — big thanks to FLYLeF blog— and I wanted to finish it today.

I loved The Dry, so I had big hopes for The Lost Man.  It did not disappoint!

The story started out very slow, and it took me a while to get to the first 75 pages or so.  Chapter one introduces the big mystery, which is the unexplained death of an Australian rancher.   The book follows the dead man’s family through the next few days of grief.

Sadly, my mental images of Australia are limited to koala bears, kangaroos, and the opening ceremony of the 2000 Summer Olympics.  I had no idea that much of the landscape is a vast plain.  The descriptions given in The Lost Man completely opened my eyes to the challenges of living in Australia.  It’s not all the green eucalyptus forests of my mind’s eye.

The Lost Man describes the pain of holding family secrets too close.  Though the Bright family members were close in some ways, some things just weren’t revealed.  The narrator, Nathan, was the perfect voice.  I also loved his son, Xander, who was mature and thoughtful in a way that we don’t often see in teenage characters.

Since the story was so distinctly Australian-based, there were many words I had to Google.  Living just a few yards from my neighbors’ houses, it’s difficult to relate to a farm that goes on for thousands of kilometers. Thankfully, the writing is descriptive enough to make those details understandable.  Jane Harper did a great job of explaining it in a way that city people can appreciate!

Although I had a hard time getting into the story at first, it really caught me by the middle.  I couldn’t put it down as the story raced to the end.  I wish there had been an epilogue, as I wanted to know more about what happened next.  Really hoping to see more about these characters.  Crossing my fingers to see a book 2!