The Disruptions of Social Media in Small Town Life

Another book I read recently based purely on a Kindle suggestion that kept popping up on my device's lock screen was All That is Lost Between Us by Sara Foster. After it came up for the tenth time, I figured I would give in and read in, again for "free" thanks to my Kindle Unlimited membership. One reason I don't mind detouring into these books is that compared to say, Tristram Shandy, I can rip through these stories very quickly usually over the course of a weekend.

Set in a small town northern England in the present day, the story takes us through the first person narrative of multiple characters, rotating through the chapters (a technique I have noticed has become a trend in contemporary popular fiction).

The story revolves a high school girl who has somehow fallen into mysterious trouble. She has a secret. She has withdrawn from her family and friends. Her mother is puzzled. We spend the most of the book trying to discover the secret.

As such the book had the feel of recent modern Gothic "Girl in Trouble" mystery stories like Gone Girl (which I have not yet read). Somehow these stories collectively tell us of the types of insecurities that many women feel in today's society, expressed through fantasies.

Very little in the story, including the revelation of the girl's "secret," surprised me. Nevertheless I found the book interesting in one key aspect, one that I often find fascinating: the degree to which technology drove the story. In this case, the technology was cell phones (specifically smart phones with cameras that can upload photos) in connection with social media. So much of the interaction between characters happens using these devices, and important plot points depending explicitly on their use. The story could not have played out in the same way at all before the invention of these technologies. That kind of observation can save an otherwise uninteresting story for me.

Outside of that aspect of the story, and how it affects life in a small rural town in England, there was little in the story that engaged me, outside of a few key passages, most of them (like the one below) expressed in the story by the girl's mother as observations about her relationship with her teenage children. In these cases, one felt what was no doubt a refreshing connection to author's own experience.