‘The Lost Hours’ not to be missed
When I was twelve years old, I helped my granddaddy bury a box in the back garden of our Savannah house. I didn’t ask him what was in it. The box belonged to my grandmother, so I didn’t care. Long before the Alzheimer’s got her mind, a fear of living had taken hold of her spirit, convincing me that my grandmother had no stories worth listening to.
But Piper Mills’ grandmother did have a story, one that unfolds through the richly drawn story of “The Lost Hours” by Karen White.
Piper went to live with her grandparents after surviving a crash that killed both her parents. She once dreamed of becoming an Olympic equestrian, but a devastating fall left her disabled. After her grandparents die, Piper is alone and adrift, mourning for everything she has lost.
While sorting through her grandparents’ things she discovers a secret room in their house as well as some old scrapbook pages of her grandmother’s. The pages are filled with stories about her grandmother, Annabelle, and her two best friends, Lillian and Josie. Also among the torn pages is a newspaper article from 1939 about the body of an unidentified Negro male infant being pulled from the Savannah River.
Piper becomes engrossed in the mystery surrounding her grandmother’s scrapbook. She tries to contact Lillian Harrington-Ross for answers but is rebuffed. So she takes matters into her own hands, surreptitiously renting the caretaker’s cottage on Lillian’s estate under the guise of doing genealogy research. There she tries to uncover her grandmother’s story and the secrets carried for a lifetime by the three girlhood friends.
“The Lost Hours” is a captivating book filled with colorful imagery. The plot is tight and White weaves philosophical gems throughout the text.
Piper discovers a phrase carved into a charm of her grandmother’s that was passed to her by an old family friend. She asks the old man about it.
I brought the charm up to my eye, squinting as I read out loud, “Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim.”
He cleared his throat. “That’s Ovid. It means ‘Be patient and strong; someday this pain will be useful to you.’ ’’
Annabelle isn’t alone in offering words of wisdom to Piper. Lillian offers some, too.
Regret is as useful as trying to stop a flooding river with your hands. It’ll keep you busy, but you’ll still drown.
The themes of grief and regret vine their way through every haunting page of “The Lost Hours.” As Piper begins to recover from her own sorrow, she begins to bond with the family of her grandmother’s old friend and finds truth in Annabelle’s words: "Dum vita est, spes est ... Where there is life, there is hope."
At its heart, “The Lost Hours” is a mystery, but it is also a tale of love, loss, forgiveness and redemption. It’s a story that will stay with readers long after its covers are closed.
