Review courtesy of All Things Urban Fantasy.

Ever since the first time I read ENDER’S GAME, Orson Scott Card had a way of grabbing my attention and pulling me out of my normal genre preferences. In recent years, while I would still pick up his titles as they caught my eye, nothing had been able to recapture that initial attraction. Reading THE LOST GATE was like rediscovering a high school crush and falling in love all over again. I laughed, I read quotes out loud, and stayed up to all hours of the night until I finished it.

The world building of THE LOST GATE is definitely what boosted my rating right up to five bats. Card, once again, has created a fascinating premise. He draws on familiar mythologies and archetypes before adding his own critical and plausible twists. If the gods and goddesses of yesteryear began to wane in power, yes, I could see some of them ending up in a family compound in Virginia. Don’t read “compound” and think Kennedy’s, though. Most of the North family is petty, cruel, and outright murderous. I think Danny is lucky to be considered a “drekka” (a magic-less person), despite the pain and suffering that came with the title. Being a drekka offers him the chance to develop outside his family’s expectations.

The juxtaposition of real world and fantasy was another one of my favorite things in this book. Danny would overcome fantastic, magical, life-threatening situations only to face being a thirteen year old kid alone in Wal-Mart. With no shoes. (The store greeter explaining the “No shirt, no shoes, no service” sign was both sad and funny). While there were times when Danny seemed bratty and reckless, Card always manages to gather these loose threads back into the narrative, and threw in a twist at the end that has me rethinking my impression of many of Danny’s earlier actions.

This is one of those books that is hard to pigeonhole into genre boundaries. Adult? Probably, despite the fact that the main character starts out as a thirteen-year-old boy, both his mindset and his experiences are pretty grown up. Fantasy? Sure, THE LOST GATE mentions gods and goddesses speaking to animals and making plants grow, fantastic abilities that any kid would want. However, Card also includes detailed mechanics that make this “magic” feel more like a tantalizing science, something to discover and understand alongside Danny. A lot of knowledge had been lost to the North family (or not shared with Danny), forcing him to piece things together from a variety of sources. As a reader I felt challenged and engaged, eager to figure out and discuss which of the theories and clues were going to fit together to form a workable magic structure.

There are so many other aspects of this book that I adored, not the least the parallel story woven in with Danny’s own. It kept me guessing until the end, unsure if I was reading distant history or current events in some far away land. THE LOST GATE is certainly the most engaging and thought provoking fantasy novel I’ve read in a long time, and one I’m going to enjoy passing on to friends and family to discuss.

Sexual Content: Danny is assaulted by a sexually aggressive woman.