The Secret of Lost Things

By Sheridan Hay

($14.95, Doubleday)



"The Secret of Lost Things" is set primarily in a multi-level used book store and an old hotel and focuses on a few of those stories as they relate to a young girl who is thrust into a new life in New York City.

Rosemary Savage comes from Australia and finds a home in a cheap hotel and a job in an old bookstore. She finds friends in other lost souls as she shows us her new city and her new life. She is soon "assimilated into the mysterious composition" of the bookstore in which she works.

What is apparently lost here is a Herman Melville manuscript, of which we gain some clues through the narrative of both Rosemary and her fellow employee, Oscar, who "had long ago made knowledge his currency of worth." Rosemary is attracted to Oscar, so here is a space in which our narrator realizes that she can be close to what she desires, but the only way for her, as she says, "I just had to keep my hands to myself."

Mary Burns is one character in The BookWORKS in historic downtown Marysville. Some see her as the owner, others see her stepping out of another book to help someone else step in.