Delightfully cracked ... Cash attends to the family crises with a winning mixture of black comedy and innocent sweetness ... It’s an engaging, slightly cartoonish story that shows off Ms. Cash’s talent for producing rapid-fire dialogue and amiably oddball characters. It helps that the author has clearly enjoyed herself.
Riotously assured ... There are moments when its break-a-heel-and-keep-sprinting energy outpaces restraint ... Still, these excesses are inseparable from the novel’s animating spirit ... Cash has announced herself as a writer with a distinctive voice, an eye for the grotesque within the mundane, and a deep skepticism of the stories that behemoth institutions tell to justify themselves.
Cash paints the alternate world of Lost Lambs in vivid, breezy prose alight with casual wit ... The book doesn’t always seem to know quite how seriously to take itself ... With her energetic prose and restless imagination, Cash does one better than survey the world; she reinvents it.
Madcap ... Part quirky crime caper, part manic cultural satire and part affectionate dramedy of family both biological and found ... The grace that saves Lost Lambs from overly committing to the bit is Cash’s evident fondness for its beleaguered eccentrics. The extermination sequence, for instance, is among the most moving this zany novel has to offer.
Comic aplomb ... Louise is the quintessential middle child, getting lost among everyone else’s desires; but is it right that the author loses track of her too? Perhaps this is by design, a joke on her essential condition, but it results in an unsatisfying hole at the center of the novel ... The book is funny, even when it’s spinning out, even when its intimations become darker. Cash has a penchant for hilarious, hypnotizing lists ... But sometimes this hammy hilarity can feel like a substitute for thoughtful plotting and considerate character development ... Cash’s construction of the Flynn marriage is prone to cliché and overexplanation ... A confident if uneven start for a morbidly funny writer.
One of the first works—and, let’s hope, not the last—to meld the old genre of the unhappy family with a much younger variety: the internet novel ... She seems to have found a middle distance between dismissiveness and sentimentality ... This is a novel about the corrosive effect of modern life that doesn’t feel corrosive. Cash is gentle with us—perhaps too gentle ... Implausible ... Villains, in Cash’s novel, can’t seem to commit to villainy. Irreconcilable differences are resolved by short periods of self-reflection. The overall effect is one of deflation ... In joining the Zadie Smiths and Jonathan Franzens of the world, Cash has undermined the tension that makes such novels work. Families can form a strong protective unit, but the price of that bond is that when they fail, they become a grief engine ... This is a shame, because a great family novel of the internet would need to take online danger seriously.
Madeline Cash’s debut novel, Lost Lambs, is not Kingsley Amis-great, but it’s strikingly funny, in the mode of Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang, with a delicious touch of Nell Zink’s weirdness. The founder of an indie journal called Forever Magazine, Cash, 29, twists strange and sweet into surprisingly tensile lines. Unsurprisingly, the novel’s film rights have already been sold ... Yes, the novel — and its comic machinery — flags a bit with all its later complications. It’s never easy to maintain a steady pace on the catwalk of craziness. The secret to the modern comic novel, as Andrew Sean Greer proved in Less, is less. But Cash pulls off a tremendously satisfying ending. It’s a tableau of family affection that cedes none of her characters’ adorable freakishness and reminds us how good it feels to be found.
By turns biting and breezy and self-referential ... Some storylines are prioritized over others, with long bouts of not hearing from certain characters ... The gaps ultimately feel intentional, though ... Yet there is no shortage of penetrating moments, either ... Every page of Cash’s debut novel is utterly absorbing, and her authorial voice is sure to win hearts and laughs. I know I’ll read whatever wry delight she pens next.
A pleasurably ridiculous story about the usual American neuroses: surveillance conspiracies, terrorism, the ephemerality of youth, and the collapse of the nuclear family ... The ending is surprisingly tender, perhaps a little too sincere – but maybe the novel’s Christianity is ultimately all part of its humour. Cash has clearly spent a lot of time in the weirdest avenues of the internet; I’ll happily follow her down whatever strange road she takes us on next.
A witty, quickfire book ... The plot may sometimes take up too much of the novel’s air; the typographical gnats may be a little winsome (should that be “wignsome”?); but in an age when the conspiracy theorists do indeed turn out to be disturbingly right as well as disturbingly wrong, and when old-fashioned tenderness and laughter are ever more required, Cash is a happy and energising new voice.
Cash’s sense of humor is propulsive, at once absurd and perceptive, grounding each narrator with a sense of self-awareness and world-weariness that makes their exploits all the more uncomfortable and fascinating ... Though the novel’s pace skews efficient and tidy, wrapping up its key threads in a way that borders on convenient after 90% of the page count ramps up the drama, Lost Lambs makes an impression for its refreshing outlook on our increasingly batshit reality, finding solace in the fundamentals of humanity.
If the plot sounds a little absurd, it is. And brilliantly so. Cash has managed to cram all the goof and melodrama of an action film/coming-of-age high-school romcom into crisp, polished prose ... For all its absurdity and edge, for a writer so 'chronically online', Lost Lambs is heart-warming. Cash’s wit has a generosity shared by few other witty writers.
It takes more than compelling characters for a novel to sustain itself, and the storylines that rose to the top in Lost Lambs were too enticing and topical to abandon ... I suspect my frustration with Lost Lambs arises from the same part of me that refuses to download TikTok, the same part of me that has set a fifteen-minute a day limit on Instagram—it’s a fear that I’m wasting time, missing something more worthwhile, more meaningful, than sponcon and celebrity soundbytes and reposted footage from a political protest. But this is the stuff of life, and the meaning is there to be made from it, the stories there to be written.
While her peers’ work may be politically relevant, irreverent, highbrow and entertaining, Cash takes things one step further: Lost Lambs has all those qualities, and also a heart.
In addition to the generous portions of humor, Cash weaves in a fun romp in which the family members get to exercise their strengths. An entertaining and breezy read reminiscent of the best of Kevin Wilson.
Between the crowd of quirky characters and drastic situations, the high-flying sentences and prose style, and Cash’s relentless joke-cracking, the novel is, like Harper, almost too clever for its own good—but the Flynns stay just real enough to win our hearts. With comic energy and wild plot twists to spare, a thoroughly charming debut.
