Lost Lambs

This is the kind of novel people keep pressing into friends’ hands, saying, just trust me. Lost Lambs arrives with the confidence of a book that already knows it will be talked about, argued over, underlined, laughed through. Madeline Cash doesn’t introduce a family so much as drop the reader straight into the middle of one that’s already fraying, already complicated, already impossible not to watch.

The Flynn family is not broken in any neat or sentimental way. Catherine and Bud’s open marriage has gone stale and sharp around the edges. Their daughters are bright, reckless, secretive, and very online in ways that feel painfully accurate. Abigail’s romance with War Crime Wes is less shocking than it is unsettlingly familiar. Louise’s private messages with an online extremist unfold quietly, almost politely, until the danger becomes undeniable. Harper, the youngest, is the sort of brilliant child adults dismiss too quickly, right up until she’s sent away to wilderness reform camp for insisting she’s being watched.

Cash writes all of this with a looseness that feels earned. The humor snaps and sparkles, then softens without warning. One moment the book is genuinely funny, laugh-out-loud funny; the next it’s startlingly tender, the kind of tenderness that sneaks up and stays. There’s no moralizing, no tidy explanations. People behave badly. People mean well. Sometimes they do both at once.

Hovering over everything is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate whose wealth presses down on the town like fog. Everyone knows something is off. No one wants to say it out loud. Harper does. Her fixation on a single shipping container becomes the thread that pulls the whole story tighter, dragging the family into a conspiracy that’s both absurd and frighteningly plausible.

What makes Lost Lambs work is not just the plot, though it moves with addictive speed, hopping between voices, perspectives, and side characters who feel oddly alive. It’s Cash’s sentences, elastic and inventive, packed with wit without ever feeling smug. She understands the American family not as a symbol, but as a messy, intimate machine held together by habit, denial, love, and a little bit of delusion.

By the end, the Flynn family hasn’t been redeemed or fixed. They’ve been seen. And somehow that’s enough. Lost Lambs doesn’t ask readers to choose between laughter and empathy. It insists, casually but firmly, that both belong on the same page.