In Lost at Sea, four teenagers are on a road trip through California. Raleigh is the outsider, picked up almost by random, and she’s suffering through a problem: she thinks she doesn’t have a soul. As the trip goes on, she becomes increasingly convinced that her soul was stolen and placed in a cat. The cats are torturing her, and she’s having a mental breakdown.

Unfortunately, Lost at Sea didn’t work for me. I loved the drawing and I thought the plot was beautiful, but then it ended so unresolved and broken. The climax contained a big pet peeve of mine – an unopened letter. I hate when books or movies or anything have an unopened letter or a diary entry that the main character never reads or pretty much any situation where enlightenment is sacrificed in some way. I know I shouldn’t hate this, that it’s a device used for a very specific purpose, but I’m an intensely curious person and it drives me nuts not to know. Those books/movies/etc leave me extremely unsatisfied because I feel like I don’t have all the information, and then I’m just angry with the author. And that’s exactly how I felt at the end of Lost at Sea. I’m left unable to appreciate the rest of this book, because of the unopened letter. Grr.

And actually, I have to admit, that wasn’t the only reason Lost at Sea disappointed me. From the very beginning of the narrative, I got a very distinct impression about what I was going to find out in the climax. For some reason, I thought I was going to discover that Raleigh’s best girl-friend, who had moved away four years ago, was the same person as the boyfriend she’d gone to California to meet. I thought this was going to be a transgendered story. I have no idea why, but I really thought it. Of course, that isn’t at all what happened, despite what I thought was heavy hinting, and in a way, that disappointed me too. Stupid to let your expectations get the better of you, but I guess we all do that, don’t we?

I wish I’d liked this one better. The art was beautiful and I really enjoyed reading the first 90% of it. It’s possible my dislike and disappointment had a lot to do with my mood. There were a string of books I read that just came across as meh to me after reading a really wonderful book, so perhaps I simply read this one at a bad time.