The Lost Archive, Lynn C. Miller

Book Review: The Lost Archive, Lynn C. Miller

Short Story Collection: The Lost Archive, Lynn C. Miller

Blog Tour August 21, 2023

I am not sure what I was expecting when I started this book. That really doesn’t matter, though, as The Lost Archive is full of unexpected twists in the lives of its characters.

Lynn C. Miller’s collection of short stories is moving and profound. Short stories, done well, pack a lot into just a very few pages. Miller does them very, very well. Although the writing is exquisite, with prose that flows and jolts, the service her writing gives to her characters is phenomenal. These characters leap off the page. Whether she is writing about a private investigator tricking a murderer into a confession, or a niece returning home after her aunt’s death, or just two friends meeting for coffee, we feel like we know these people.

I often think of short stories as being in the aorist tense. In some languages (not English) there is a special verb tense that captures a moment. My professor suggested we think of it as a snapshot, a photo that may hint at what came before or what comes next, but in and of itself it has frozen a moment in time.

The Lost Archive captures those moments perfectly. These people had lives before this moment (and often enough background is given to understand their history) and their lives will continue beyond this moment. But what matters is this moment! Life changes and major decisions usually involve a lot of thinking and planning before making a choice, but there is a moment of divergence, a moment that delineates before the decision and after the decision, before the event and after the event. We are constantly creating our own stories, filled with before and after moments when the choice was made, the life was lost, the decision was final, and we can never go back to the same place, the same person, that we were.

If those moments could be encapsulated in a story, we should hope a writer as gifted as Lynn C. Miller is the one telling our story.

Our thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things for our copy of The Lost Archive, provided so we could write an honest review as part of this blog tour. The opinions here are solely those of Scintilla. For other perspectives, check out the other bloggers on this tour.

Book Review: The Lost Archive, Lynn C. Miller