#BlogTour The Finding of Martha Lost by Caroline Wallace @TransworldBooks

The Finding of Martha Lost by Caroline Wallace
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Liverpool, 1976: Martha is lost.

She’s been lost since she was a baby, abandoned in a suitcase on the train from Paris. Ever since, she’s waited in lost property for someone to claim her. It’s been sixteen years, but she’s still hopeful.

Meanwhile, there are lost property mysteries to solve: a suitcase that may have belonged to the Beatles, a stuffed monkey that keeps appearing. But there is one mystery Martha has never been able to solve – and now time is running out. If Martha can’t discover who she really is, she will lose everything…

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I have to admit that the cover is one of the reasons that I was drawn to the book and of course the description of the book about a young girl that grows up in a train station after being abandoned in a suitcase. 16-year-old Martha has been raised by an over religious "mother", and she is told she can't leave the train station because it would collapse if she did that. But, when her mother dies everything changes and she needs to find her birth mother to be able to run the lost property place in the train station. Then, there is the lost suitcase that is said to belong to Mel Evans, roadie to the Beatles...

The Finding of Martha Lost is an interesting and special book about a young girl coming of age. Martha has grown up in a train station, this is her world and she has never put her foot outside. However, everything is changing for her. I loved the whole train station world with its odd characters, from the old man with the bowler hat living below in the sewers to the young man in a roman costume. And Martha is a special girl, she can see everything she touches history from keys to hockey sticks.

The Beatles part of the story was something that I did not completely fall for. I was way more interested in the train world than what happened with the suitcase, and it didn't help that Max Cole, the man that found the suitcase, is an unpleasant person that Martha seems to fall for. He's POV in this book didn't feel interesting. I didn't mind the story about Mel Evens, but I could not really find myself that interested in the storyline with Max and the second half of the story when Max shows up at the train station just felt a little bit less interesting because if that. Still, it a charming book, I just wish I had been a bit more taken with the story and perhaps that it would have been a bit more magical realism in the story than Martha ability to touch and know things about objects past.