Title: We Are Lost and Found
Author: Helene Dunbar
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Length: 304 Pages
Category: Young Adult
At a Glance: We Are Lost and Found is not a teen romance. It is wholly character driven, deals with myriad heavy subjects that make it less than a light read, and I was so drawn in by the characters and the candidness of Dunbar’s storytelling.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Michael is content to live in the shadow of his best friends, James and Becky. Plus, his brother, Connor, has already been kicked out of the house for being gay and laying low seems to be Michael’s only chance at avoiding the same fate.
To pass the time before graduation, Michael hangs out at The Echo where he can dance and forget about his father’s angry words, the pressures of school, and the looming threat of AIDS, a disease that everyone is talking about, but no one understands.
Then he meets Gabriel, a boy who actually sees him. A boy who, unlike seemingly everyone else in New York City, is interested in him and not James. And Michael has to decide what he’s willing to risk to be himself.
Review: If I had ever been in doubt that it takes a village to publish a book, I needed only to read the two Afterwards and the Acknowledgments at the end of Helene Dunbar’s We Are Lost and Found to disabuse myself of that notion. And while I confess that I questioned a time or two during the reading whether this particular story was the author’s to tell, not to mention that I wasn’t confident at times that this story was mine to read, the obvious respect for authenticity to the narrative, to the time, as well as sensitivity to and the means by which the author honors those who lived at least parts of this story as their own reality, men who lived it and also lost people to what was then a dangerous enigma, gives the novel a resonant poignancy and, more importantly, credibility, and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to experience the emotions it engendered.
The year was 1983, and “I want my MTV” was on every teenager’s lips. Video hadn’t quite killed the radio star, but Madonna was getting heavy rotation, U2’s War album was poised to elevate them as the face of conscientious pacifism, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood just wanted people to Relax. Boy George and Annie Lennox gave great androgyny, and we all took notice, trying to mimic the fashion and the hairstyles that defied gravity. New York City’s Times Square still boasted a thriving sex market and drug trade, and Dunbar captures it all through a solid plethora of references that grounded me in the past, and while I refuse to think of the book as a historical piece—let’s just call it retro—it is the story of a time and a generation that should never become lost in the annals of history.
We Are Lost and Found is not a teen romance, though we remain alongside the novel’s narrator, sixteen-year-old Michael Bartolomeo, through both the elation and disappointment of his journey into first love. First and foremost, this is a coming out and coming of age novel set in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, as the ‘gay cancer’, as it was known early on, begins to make its presence felt in the New York City Michael introduces. He invites readers into the secret he’s keeping and begins to recount how this mysterious new illness would influence his own self-discovery and sexual awakening with a boy named Gabriel. Michael is joined by his two best friends, Becky and James—James, whom I adored, comes across as an old soul, world-weary as his own fears inform his choice to avoid sex and relationships—and Michael’s older brother, Connor. Michael allows us glimpses at how each of these people who are so important to him affect and alter and impact his story. This novel also tackles other subjects that center around the whole, including homophobia, safe sex, abstinence, a random hate crime, and the manner in which Michael and Connor’s parents reacted to having not one but two gay sons. They are the throwaway boys of two people I had a difficult time deciding which I loathed more. Both of them earned every single bit of that loathing too.
Everyone has a story, Michael. Maybe you just don’t know the plot of yours yet.
We Are Lost and Found is a book that serves as a reminder of how much of our youth we spend wanting little more than to be seen and accepted for who we are, how the biggest obstacles at the time are surviving high school and deciding what happens next. The reader is required to accept Michael as a reliable narrator, as the story is told entirely in his voice, in vignettes, in a stream of consciousness and movement and time sort of way. And when I say “entirely” in his voice, that’s not at all an exaggeration. I’m not sure if there’s a literary term for the style of storytelling, but there is no interactive dialogue in the entirety of the book, no character speaks in any other way than with Michael as mouthpiece. Readers are told by Michael what everyone says, making it read more like an epistolary than a first-person narration, but with a unique quality that never made me feel as though I was being narrated at. It reads more like we’re standing in the wings, watching as Michael shares everything with his audience, and I ended up loving how the delivery fit with the story being told.
We Are Lost and Found is wholly character driven, deals with myriad heavy subjects that make it less than a light read, and everything that happens to Michael along the way builds to a single point: to the place where he finds the courage to embrace himself, owns his fears, discovers his sense of Self, even taking baby steps towards his own activism. He learns to live bravely in an uncertain and changeable world, and while his story is a stark contrast to my own experiences during the several months the story takes place, it’s why I was so drawn in by the characters and the candidness of Dunbar’s storytelling. Living awhile in other people’s stories is one of the best parts of reading.
You can buy We Are Lost and Found here:
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