#BlogTour-‘The Lost Thumb’ by Orla Owen

About the book…

In a small town in New South Wales, Lara and Luella Jeffreys lead isolated lives until the night they are left alone for the first time, and Luella decides to have some fun.

That evening goes horribly wrong.

After Luella wakes up in hospital, she’s kept prisoner at home with her mother acting as her warden. Lara is sent to school to keep up the pretence that she is fine, her sister is fine, and the world is fine.

Except they aren’t.

The local storekeeper, sensing that something’s wrong, pushes her son to befriend Lara but the results of her meddling are deadly…

My thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things for my invite to this wonderful blog tour for ‘The Lost Thumb’ by Orla Owen. This incredible story is available on ebook, via Kindle Unlimited, and paperback now.

This is a literary fiction debut which absolutely astonishes in its maturity, depth and choice of subject matter. Lara has missed her thumb since she was small, jammed it in a door and lost it, good riddance too according to Mother who repeatedly tried to get her to stop sucking her thumb to no avail. After 16 years of being in a this stifling, suffocating and emotionally stunted environment, both Lara and Luella have lost the abililty to see themselves as the outside world see them,the way that school children and teachers treat them rolls off thier backs as what is waiting at home is so much worse.

Set in New South Wales, in an uncertain time frame, the girls are isolated by their Mother-she is not given a name through the entire book-who has very strict rules governing every part of their life. From the lack of colour to their lives to the lack of pictures of them as a family, Mother acts as though the two girls are born disappointments and no matter how tight she turns the screws to make them perfect, they are bound to let her down.

Until the night comes that they are left alone.

And Luella invites 2 boys over to party and everything goes horribly, horribly wrong.

Luella is punished and Lara takes on the weight of both twins, simultaneously knowing that what is going on is wrong yet unable to do anything to prevent it-she is ,after all, still a child!

The narrative is all told from Lara’s perspective as she desperately tries to rescue her sister from Mother, her voice an unflinching tone of someone so used to being treated like this, that the deviations from the norm-a taste of coke, home ec lessons where they get to make, and eat, cake-are heartbreakingg. As much as she sucks the marrow of joy from these seemingly tiny moments, your heart aches for her as she recouns the lessons that Mother has taught about sugar and caffeine and other malign influences on the growing body.

The emotional, and physical neglect that the twins suffer is horrendous. It does not need to be graphically described to be effecting and it is in the gaps that the reader joins different parts and increases the sense of distress about what is going on. People have noticed, especially after Luella is withdrawn from school, to the point where something so awful happens that Lara cannot hide what has been happening any longer. But she has spent so long thinking that this is her reality, that her recovery is slow, painful and heartbreaking.

As a reader you are urging someone to pick up on Lara’s cues, the teachers, a neighbour, anyone but the remote and isolated home that the 3 live in means that so much can be hidden from view. Especially as Mother is a nurse, and as such a respected professional.But Marjorie, the local shop owner and her son, Sean, are there when they are most needed to be and I was so invested in them seeing Lara and Luella, that I wanted to reach into the pages and shake them to move more quickly.

Orla has created a hyperreal environment which draws you in and you dare not let go until you know that Lara is safe at last. It has a quiet strength that draws all the emotion from the person reading it, torn between wondering what happened to make Mother this way, and what happened with the twins when they were younger. What made her such the abusive beast that she became? That would be my only complaint, that there was no resolution, I wanted the book to be thrown at her for what she inflicted on Lara and Luella, but as in real life, there are very rarely neat conclusions and defined retribution.

‘The Lost Thumb’ is a novel that deserves a slow and patient read, to soak in the nuances of all the communciation between a mother who does not know how to mother, and 2 girls who deserved a mother who did. It is brutal, tear-jerking, heart wrenching, bold and brave. Recommended for people who read and appreciated ‘‘The Lovely Bones’; (it seems wrong to say ‘enjoyed’ due to the themes employed in both books, therefore ‘appreciated’ feels more apt).

About the author…

Orla Owen is a writer, online editor, and author of the novel The Lost Thumb. She’s been writing since she was a child, and in 2016 was picked to be mentored by Sarah Savitt at Virago.

Her writing focuses on the dark and macabre side of family life, the parts that go on behind closed doors.

Before she became a writer, she was an actress and drama practitioner, studying Theatre at Bretton Hall College of the Arts. She has performed at the Royal Court and Edinburgh fringe, as well as working on The Women’s Theatre Workshop mentoring scheme.

Supporting women in writing is important to her, and she was lucky enough to work on a writers’ mentoring scheme, as an assistant to the author Kerry Hudson, at the WoMentoring Project.

She is currently working on her second novel, PAH, which will be released in early 2020

Links-https://www.orlaowen.com/

Twitter-@orlaowenwriting