Book Review--Lost and Found, by Carolyn Parkhurst

I'm actually a little surprised, when I think about it, that I haven't read a book that takes place on a fictional reality show before. It's a great idea, but one I had not considered until I read Lost and Found. It seems to be sort of like The Amazing Race, which I have only seen a couple of times. There are some challenges that are more like Survivor, such as when the teams have to keep each other awake as long as they can or lie down covered in 120 degree sand as long as they can.

In this fictional reality show, two-person teams have to find various objects in different countries. It sounds like fun, except that you don't really have time to stop and explore the countries, and you just know you'd be delayed at airports a lot. The book delves into the minds of several of the contestants, but at its center is a mother-daughter team. Laura, the mother, got the idea to go on the show as a bonding experience for her and her teenage daughter, Cassie. Cassie just had a baby, and she had managed to hide her entire pregnancy from Laura. So I guess Laura decided they needed some serious bonding time. But Cassie also has another secret about herself that Laura manages to figure out for herself during the course of the game.

All of the contestants were chosen due to some human interest factor. Cassie and Laura were chosen because Cassie told them about the baby. Another team was chosen because one of the team members donated part of his liver to his baby son, who had a rare disease. Justin and Abby were chosen because they are so-called "ex-gays" who are now embracing heterosexuality, or at least trying to. That goes about as well as you'd expect. Abby is a nice enough person at least. Interestingly, she's not religious, but sadly, she always felt ashamed about being a lesbian, so she joined this redemption group where she met Justin, who is vastly obnoxious in his religiosity and his disdain for "women's work." That's one of the rules in their redemption group; they have to go through gender retraining and men are supposed to do traditional "men's work" and so on. I thought he'd blow a gasket when the teams had to sew something (I'd be alarmed too, but just because I never learned how to sew well, even though my home-ec teachers tried. Even the boys in the class thought I was pretty hopeless at it).

The producers try to get people to talk about these personal human interest stories, but more of them than you'd expect (since they did volunteer for a reality show) don't seem to be exhibitionistic enough to really want to share these things on the air. I have often wondered about how much the producers of reality shows try to influence the results. Here they definitely did some of that. For example, the item the teams were supposed to sew was a baby dress; this was chosen specifically to try to get Cassie to open up about her experience. She was the one who had told them about it in the first place, but when she did that she didn't seem to realize how willing the show's producers would be to exploit that.

So anyway, the game is like Amazing Race in that the last team to find something is out of the running. Losing teams are asked what they have found, even though they have lost the race. The show's producers are looking for something profound here, which they may or may not get. For example, one brother-sister team who was eliminated early found that it was best if the brother didn't skip any of his doses of antipsychotic medication.

I guess one thing I learned from reading it is that perhaps a reality show isn't the best place for a good bonding session. Not that I really thought it would be. I mean, your every move is scrutinized, and while the producers love it when people spill their guts about all kinds of personal things, these things are often the very sorts of things that maybe a person would rather not have publicized. Still, the characters you get to know did seem to benefit from the experience, and it was quite entertaining to read.

Well, off to work on my Survivor application.