Reviewed by PJ Ausdenmore
Publisher: Penguin
4.75 Stars

Piper Mills was certain that after the death of her parents when she was six years old nothing that bad would ever happen to her again.  She was wrong.   Taken in by her maternal grandparents, Piper grew up in Savannah, Georgia where her grandfather first introduced her to the horses around which her world would revolve.  A fearless rider, Piper was on her way to Olympic glory when her misjudgment resulted in the death of her horse and near fatal injuries for Piper.  Six years later, she still exists in the shadows of life, refusing to go near a horse, unable to move forward or recapture the joy that was once an intrinsic part of her, much like the grandmother who had always hovered on the fringes of Piper’s life and, because of Alzheimers, was now lost to her forever.   But then her grandmother’s lawyer brings her a key to a hidden attic room in her grandparents’ home and passionate letters her grandmother, Annabelle had written many years earlier begging forgiveness from a woman named Lillian.  What Piper discovers in the attic room, in Annabelle’s letters and in the pages of an old scrapbook makes her realize that she had never known her grandmother at all or anything about the secret events that had changed a vibrant, fearless young woman into a sad, hopeless person who was afraid to live.  To her immense shame, she realizes that Annabelle had had a story to tell if only Piper had cared enough to ask.  One woman, Lillian Harrington-Ross, knows the story but she’s not talking and Piper’s only hope of getting answers is at Lillian’s horse farm where she’ll be forced to face not only her greatest fear but also her greatest failure.

The strictures of Savannah society in the 1920’s and 1930’s were very clear.  It was a time when wealthy young white girls were expected to be friends with their own kind, not poor girls and certainly not girls of color and where young men of color were routinely lynched for nothing more than being young men of color.  Yet during that time, against all odds, Annabelle, Josie and Lillian, three young girls of different social class and color formed a friendship, sharing a bond as close as sisters.  They bought a single gold chain and a scrapbook and for ten years they shared the two items, four months per year for each girl, adding charms to the necklace to signify important events and filling the pages of the book with the hopes, dreams and heartaches of their young lives.  They were telling their stories, as Southern women do, and looking forward to that day far in the future when they would re-live those stories with each other and pass them down to their daughters, for the three knew that nothing would ever shake their unbreakable bond of friendship.  But one day in 1939, something unforgiveable occurred and their friendship ended.  Tearing the pages from the scrapbook, they each took their own parts of their shared story and went their separate ways, never to see or speak to one another again.  More than seventy years later, only Lillian still lives, only Lillian knows the truth about what happened that day in 1939 and the events leading up to it, a truth she has tried desperately to forget every single day of those seventy-some years.   Now Annabelle’s granddaughter, Piper has come searching for answers but Lillian knows that if the truth is revealed none of their lives will ever be the same.

The Lost Hours is a passionate story about the bonds of friendship and family tested by tragedy, unthinkable betrayal and heartbreak, but forged stronger than ever in forgiveness, redemption and the enduring power of love.  Transitioning smoothly from first person to third, the story unfolds primarily through Piper, Lillian and Lillian’s granddaughter, Helen in present day and the voices of the young Annabelle, Josie and Lillian as recorded in their scrapbook and letters.  White has a gift for creating complex, multi-dimensional characters and an ambience through her words that had me believing I could actually smell the floral bouquet of Lillian’s gardens, hear the gentle rustling of the breeze off the river as it whispered through the live oaks lining the long drive and feel the moist humidity of sultry southern nights on my skin.   She drew me in like a tall glass of sweet tea on a hot summer’s day but instead of quenching my thirst, reading The Lost Hours has only made me crave more from the very talented Karen White.