Book Review: Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

I was so hooked after Yesteryear that I ordered Lost Lambs to arrive right as I finished it, no gap, no chance to lose momentum. This one felt like more of a slow burn, but the small inconsistencies along the way had me diving into Reddit mid read to check whether I'd somehow got a misprint. I won't say what, in case anyone else wants to go in fresh and have the same "wait, what" moment I did. Book Review: Lost Lambs, the premise might sound far fetched on paper, but probably not by 2026 standards, if I'm honest.

You get such a deep insight into each character that you can properly engage with all of them, and I found myself genuinely thinking about how each one would act in the next scene before I'd even got there. This took me a lot longer to read than Yesteryear did, and I actually finished it on the flight to Barcelona, which felt fitting somehow.

I come from a family that's full of drama, borderline EastEnders levels of it, so reading about a family finding themselves in a slightly out there yet still weirdly realistic situation felt a bit like home. I often think I'm personally living in the Truman Show given the strange things that seem to happen to me on a fairly regular basis, so a book full of chaos happening to ordinary people didn't feel like much of a stretch. I found myself resonating most with Harper, a smart but strange kid. Maybe less smart the older I get, but strange remains fairly consistent.

It's not the most complex storyline, and there's a lot of character work, with the whole thing feeling a bit mundane for maybe 80% of it, which I actually enjoyed rather than minded. I can't imagine there are many books out there with a similar shape or structure to this one. Madeline Cash has written something that shouldn't really work on paper and somehow does, and I'm still thinking about the Flynn family days after finishing it.