The Lost Hours by Karen White

When my holds on The Lost Hours and The Peach Keeper came up at the library at the same time, I remarked on how similar the plots seemed to be.  Both books were about a young woman finding out about the secret past of her grandmother and her friends.  And in both books, the grandmother was unable to tell her secrets to her granddaughter herself, so the young woman was left to find out what happened as best she could.

The way the two novels played out, and the secrets the main character discovered, were very different from one another, however.  Where The Peach Keeper was a little lighter and had some undercurrents of magic running throughout the novel, the secrets in The Lost Hours — and the way in which they unfolded — were much darker.

Both books were compelling, but reading them almost back-to-back, I think The Lost Hours had a much more serious message.  Whereas The Peach Keeper was more about enduring friendship, The Lost Hours was much more focused on the tragedy that tore friends apart.  Even the motto, about how life is painful and you just have to keep getting back up on the horse when you fall off (literally and figuratively), demonstrated how much more serious the novel was.

It's a great novel, though — as evidenced by the fact that I stayed up until 4am Wednesday night, even though I could barely keep my eyes open, in order to finish it!