The Lost Girls of Devon is the story of 4 generations of women, of good and bad mothers, and the vulnerability of girls. The central character is Zoe Fairchild, who lives in New Mexico with her teenage daughter, Isabel. Zoe is called back to England by her grandmother, Lillian. Zoe’s friend Diana has gone missing, and for some reason Lillian thinks that Zoe can help work out what is going on. The problem is that Zoe does not talk to her own mother Poppy any more than she has to, but her mother has been helping to look after aging Lillian, who is in the early stages of dementia. Poppy went traveling when Zoe was a young girl, and never came back, so Zoe feels rage at Poppy for abandoning her. But now Poppy is a tarot card reader, and makes a living from offering her new age mystical talents to help people. 

Each of the Fairchild women takes turns to tell their stories in alternating chapters. Lillian has made a fortune as a mystery writer, and lives in a mansion in the small Devon village. Poppy, who lives in the same village, has travelled the world and had a great love she lost and who she lives in honor of. She is attuned to the plants and the earth. Zoe is a commercial artist who married an indie-musician but that didn’t work out. Isabel is recovering from a bullying incident with her school friends, who has left the school because of that. She is in therapy to process her trauma, and continues to do both schoolwork and therapy online from the UK. Isabel is also a writer, giving her something in common with her great-grandmother.

O’Neal weaves her storylines together using these different threads, and they blend well. Each woman has her secrets, her strengths, her weaknesses, and they are strikingly different characters at different stages of their lives, brought together for a short period. The mystery of the missing friend Diana slowly gets solved, bringing another theme of women’s exploitation into the story. It’s a rather serious element that isn’t very well explored, and the plotline doesn’t make a lot of sense. It serves mainly as a device to bring different characters together. 

Listening to the audiobook performed by four speakers is a satisfying experience. The four voices are well suited to their characters and the variety helps to keep the book interesting. It takes the ability of Poppy to read tarot cards well for granted, and it is a little odd to have a supernatural element thrown in so casually, but Poppy also acts as much as a psychotherapist as she does a predictor of the future. The anger of Zoe towards Poppy for abandoning her as a child is maybe the most striking element of the book, And O’Neal handles that well. There’s no magical moment when all is forgiven but eventually the relationship between mother and daughter does improve. The book as a whole coheres well. 

Christian Perring is editor of Metapsychology. He lives in Suffolk County of Long Island, NY. He is Full Adjunct Professor at St John’s University, Vice President of AAPP and is an APPA Certified Philosophical Counselor.

Categories: Fiction

Keywords: fiction,