Lost and Wanted

This is an interesting one to review. Lost and Wanted is not going to be for everyone - it is quite science-heavy, it's kind of about grief, it's mostly a remembrance of a friendship after Helen's college roommate and BFF Charlie dies (by complications from lupus or assisted suicide, depending on which state you live in). I'll try to break this down with those three things in mind.

1. You don't actually have to know anything about science, or really even follow some of the stuff Helen's talking about, in order to read this book. Which is maybe both one of its strengths AND weaknesses: it's really cool to see a woman in a STEM career (physicist and professor at MIT) that clearly loves what she does, is good at it, and has worked hard to get to where she is; because Helen has a young child, she does a reasonably good job explaining concepts in a way that makes sense to non-STEM brains. The downside is that, as a person who struggled in science and really only understood the algebraic stuff in the one college physics class I took, a lot of the conversations between Helen and Neel (her former boyfriend and current coworker, whom she spends a lot of time collaborating with [and that's not a euphemism]) are so high-tier as to almost be more philosophical. I still really don't understand the significance of gravitational wave measurement or kilonovas or the difference between a brain and a mind as Einstein would have argued or whatever, or why I am supposed to care about those things.

2. There are elements of grief here; Charlie has just died, and her parents, her husband and her daughter Simmi all play relatively big roles in the novel. You see how each of them deals with the loss in bits, anger and denial and depression, but because it's from Helen's perspective — and Helen and Charlie had kind of drifted over the years as Charlie got sicker and they lived on opposite coasts — you really only see fragments of grief, but there is an undercurrent throughout, of death and grappling with it.

3. Overall, this story is really more of Helen looking back on her and Charlie's friendship, through flashbacks in their shared past: Visiting each other across the country during conferences or family visits, taking road trips in college, helping each other when a grad school professor becomes creepy and menacing. I wouldn't say it's a fantastic portrait of a friendship — I do wonder why these two would have wound up as close as they were — but there is a lot about their past and it feels a lot like Helen processing Charlie's death and life.

There is plot, but it felt more like it worked well as a character study, if that's your thing, though I don't know if it's more a character study of Charlie or Helen.

I enjoyed it for the most part, once I got used to the flow of the science stuff, but I don't think I'll pick it up again.