ARC Review: The End of Getting Lost by Robin Kirman

The End of Getting Lost by Robin Kirman
Expected Release Date: February 15, 2022

Recommended: sure
For a frantic sprint through Europe, for unexpected knowledge discovered, for a domestic thriller on the run, for a desperately mad and all-consuming kind of love

Summary

The year is 1996—a time before cell phones, status updates, and location tags—when you could still travel to a remote corner of the world and disappear, if you chose to do so. This is where we meet Gina Reinhold and Duncan Lowy, a young artistic couple madly in love, traveling around Europe on a romantic adventure. It’s a time both thrilling and dizzying for Gina, whose memories are hazy following a head injury—and the growing sense that the man at her side, her one companion on this strange continent, is keeping secrets from her.

Just what is Duncan hiding and how far will he go to keep their pasts at bay? As the pair hop borders across Europe, their former lives threatening to catch up with them while the truth grows more elusive, we witness how love can lead us astray, and what it means to lose oneself in love… The End of Getting Lost is “atmospheric, lyrical, and filled with layered insights into the complexities of marriage” (Susie Yang, New York Times bestselling author of White Ivy). “Kirman is wonderfully deft with suspense and plot” (Katie Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Girls in Trucks) in this “electric page-turner” (Courtney Maum, author of Costalegre and Touch), a novel that is both a tightrope act of deception as much as it is an elegant exploration of love and marriage, and our cherished illusions of both. With notes of Patricia Highsmith, Caroline Kepnes, and Lauren Groff, Robin Kirman has spun a delicious tale of deceit, redemption, and the fight to keep love alive—no matter the costs.

Thoughts

I started this one for the different countries and the traveling, and I stayed for the question of who knew what, exactly. I honestly couldn’t tell for the majority of this book what was going to be the end. I did have a suspicion, but I wasn’t confident in it, just thinking that it was the most reasonable and likely ending based on what I had to work with.

Told in the point of view of both characters, it’s interesting to see the way they each interpret different scenarios. It’s extremely high stress at times, though. For me at least! Like the scene with the race I had to read it twice just to really understand it because I was so pumped with adrenaline the first time that I missed a lot and just got the gist of it in my haste to see what happened next!

I definitely think there’s an element of all of this, the premise, that is somewhat hard to believe. There’s a decent job of explaining how they get around rules and regulations and stuff, but in the end it is a little hard to believe that this could really happen. In fact, one of my favorite moments was when main character said how insane the story sounded and that even if someone had told a person what was going on, nobody would believe them because it sounded so far-fetched. That was a really funny and self-reflective moment to me.

The settings come into play a little bit with this, but they’re on such a mad dash that a lot of the time we don’t really see much of the area. It’s more about the difficulty in the journey than it is about the details of the location. So if you’re in this like I was to enjoy a jaunt around Europe, it’s probably not exactly what you’re expecting in that way.

Is amnesia ever not cheesy? I don’t think so. But if you’re up for a suspenseful chase through Europe, then this will take all of those boxes!

Thanks to NetGalley for a free advanced copy. This is my honest review!