The Book of Lost Things (The Book of Lost Things, #1) in The Alternative Worlds

Oct 23, 2011 mark monday rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy-modern, come-of-age, legendarium

Fugue state, formally Dissociative Fugue... usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity. Fugues are usually precipitated by a stressful episode.

in world war 2-era england, young David loses his mother after a lingering illness and begins to experience strange dissociative episodes, often involving the sounds of books whispering to him and usually ending with him falling into unconsciousness. soon enough, his father finds a n Fugue state, formally Dissociative Fugue... usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity. Fugues are usually precipitated by a stressful episode.

in world war 2-era england, young David loses his mother after a lingering illness and begins to experience strange dissociative episodes, often involving the sounds of books whispering to him and usually ending with him falling into unconsciousness. soon enough, his father finds a new wife named Rose - a nurse at his mother's hospice - and David finds himself with a stepmother and an infant half-brother. David is deeply unhappy with this development. after the new family moves out of london to Rose's country home in order to escape german bombers, David realizes a shadowy, crooked figure has sinister designs on him and his brother. one night, after a particularly bad argument with his folks, David hears his mother's voice calling him. following that voice, he crawls into a hole within a sunken garden - just as a german bomber also falls from the sky and crashes into that garden. he emerges into a sinister fantasyland. his quest: Find and Rescue His Mother. his nemesis: The Crooked Man.

John Connolly is best known as a respected writer of an excellent detective series. his strengths have been widely reported: gorgeously dark and lush descriptive skills, a sensitive portrayal of private eye Charlie Parker - an unusually tormented protagonist (tragic even for a genre noted for its sad, sad heroes), and a unsettling ability to mix the prosaic with the supernatural to startling effect. in this book, Connolly takes each of those gifts and streamlines them in a way that is appropriate for the reader of young adult or even children's literature - although this novel is very clearly an Adult Fairy Tale. the result is pleasingly distinctive. there are many scenes that are striking in their psychosocial nuance, their foreboding atmosphere, their ability to evoke that wonderfully shivery feeling of fearful anticipation. my favorite passage happens early on: David's daunting entry into the strange fantasy world... an eerie vignette that is a model of careful, suspenseful writing, featuring unearthly quiet, child-like flowers, a a taciturn Woodsman, the smoking remains of the german bomber, bleeding trees, a house in the woods with a Giger-like exterior, and a gathering of evil wolfish beings.

Dionysian imitatio, a literary method of imitation conceived as the practice of emulating, adaptating, reworking and enriching a source text by an earlier author.

Book of Lost Things is a book of mythopoeic templates - revisited, revised, regurgitated, remixed, and reimagined. we have an entire company of Big Bad Wolves, reconfigured as ambitious wolf-men, born of a grotesquely slutty Little Red Hood and sprung from the nightmares of a juvenile king... a perhaps not-so-Wicked Stepmother... a malevolent and terrifying Sleeping Beauty... Childe Roland, transformed as a brave gay soldier in search of his long-lost lover... trolls and harpies and a savage, hungry Beast... a young girl's spirit in a glass jar... and our villain, a gleeful child-thief, a striker of dark bargains, a Rumpelstiltskin, an old old devil: The Crooked Man.

the use of revisionism is, sadly, not always successful. a comic interlude with the socialist Seven Dwarves and an obese, monstrous Snow White is depressingly unfunny and a little desperate (at least to this reader). and a long part near the end, depicting various torture chambers and examples of The Crooked Man's terrible villainy seems to be merely an excuse for Connolly to indulge himself with a gloatingly vicious array of sadistic tableau. both sequences were eye-rolling and sigh-inducing.

but those are aberrations; despite them, Connolly more than succeeds in creating delightful and intriguing reinterprations of figures from fairy and folk tale. even better, David's character is a slow-burning but dynamic one, changing in bits and starts from boy to man with each new encounter. he is a realistically flawed protagonist as well as a brave and endearing little hero.

Memento mori, a Latin phrase translated as "Remember your mortality", "Remember you must die" or "Remember you will die"... it names a genre of artistic work which varies widely, but which all share the same purpose: to remind people of their own mortality.

the novel's extended endings were a brilliant surprise. to avoid spoilers, i'll just say that i was entirely taken aback by the meaning of The Book of Lost Things itself. and - even more memorably, more intensely - the closing pages' no-nonsense illustration of the potential and/or inherent tragedy of human life in general... and the idea of that tragedy - no matter how intimate - somehow not really being that tragic at all - just simply a part of the greater cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

i hate to end a review with a tv show reference... but if you have ever seen the last 10 minutes or so of Six Feet Under's final episode - a wondrously sad, wistful, yet somehow uplifting experience - you will know exactly what i mean. the ending of this rather fantastic book is equally moving. ...more

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Nov 13, 2007 Brooke rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, 2008

The Book of Lost Things is basically a fairy tale that pays homage to other fairy tales; the main character David disappears into a magic land after a German bomber plane crashes into his backyard and experiences a multitude of events culled from the books he's read (including, in the book's funniest scene, a book about Communism).

It's a story with many layers and an ambiguous end, which makes it a shame that the last 130 pages of the book are the author's notes and thoughts about the story. Eve ...more

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Sep 09, 2008 Sarah rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fairy-tale-myth-fable, fantasy

Guillermo del Toro should option this book, if he hasn't already. It has all the hallmarks of a del Toro movie: fantasy, horror, fantasy horror, real horror, heart, beasties, beauty, painful choices. I'd put it closer to the fairytale of Hellboy II (which I highly recommend) than the fairytale of Pan's Labyrinth (which I will never watch again). The grimmest Grimm, hyperviolent (SO many decapitations) and unflinching but mostly fair. A touch of Jo Walton as well, since the protagonist, David, is ...more

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Jul 24, 2008 Sandi rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2008, fantasy

I really wish I could rate "The Book of Lost Things" higher. (If there were half stars, I'd give it 3-1/2) I really wanted to love it. But, it just felt too familiar to me. I've seen "The Wizard of Oz" and "The Neverending Story". I've read the fairy tales set down by the Brothers Grimm and "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". This book draws so heavily on its sources that it ends up seeming quite unoriginal. There weren't any surprises along the way either. I knew that David, the main charac ...more

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Aug 24, 2011 Maree rated it really liked it

I love books whose endings make me sigh with contentment. And this book had a great ending. It's not about living happily ever after, but living realistically but still being able to live a full life.

David doesn't like the changes that happen to his family after his beloved mother dies; his father remarries shortly afterward to his pregnant girlfriend and David's half-brother Georgie is born and takes up much of the attention. David loses himself further in fairy tales and books, which speak to ...more

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Nov 28, 2010 Nicky rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, fairytales

I really enjoyed The Book of Lost Things. I was worried I wouldn't, as I'd heard opinions both ways, but I did like it. I thought that some of the descriptions were just spot on, from the very start --

He had, in truth, been losing [his mother] for a very long time. The disease that was killing her was a creeping, cowardly thing, a sickness that ate away at her from the inside, slowly consuming the light within so that her eyes grew a little less bright with each passing day, and her skin a littl

I really enjoyed The Book of Lost Things. I was worried I wouldn't, as I'd heard opinions both ways, but I did like it. I thought that some of the descriptions were just spot on, from the very start --

He had, in truth, been losing [his mother] for a very long time. The disease that was killing her was a creeping, cowardly thing, a sickness that ate away at her from the inside, slowly consuming the light within so that her eyes grew a little less bright with each passing day, and her skin a little more pale.

After all, I just watched someone die like that. And that is how it is: something is lost every day. The first day I visited my grandfather in hospital, he smiled at me and tried to reassure me that he would be alright soon. The next time I visited him, I was the only person he recognised -- or at least, the only one he responded to (he still tried to smile at me, especially when I told him I was making Grandma a cup of tea). Then the next day, he couldn't see us at all, and all he could say was "I don't understand". And then the next day he took one long last breath and died. So yes, that's the way it goes: illness eats a person up from the inside, stealing them piece by piece, day by day.

Maybe it was that first bit and how it struck me as just right, and the fact that I'm grieving now, that got me so invested in the story. In a way, I expected all of it: it's basically the same story as the first Malory Towers book, or even Edmund and Lucy from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Sibling jealousies and conflicts. The rewritings of fairytales weren't all that surprising to me, immersed as I am in fairytale retellings. But something about the turn of phrase was just right, and I fell in love with the quiet love story of Roland and Raphael, as well.

There's a lot of violence and ugliness in this book, and sometimes that doesn't read very well. I read reviews of this that felt the retellings were quite female-positive, but it didn't feel that way to me. There're powerful women in the story, but their sexuality is almost part of the horror. It's the homosexual relationship between Raphael and Roland, with one of them safely off-screen, which is idealised, and the homosocial relationships between Roland and David, or David and his father, or David and the Woodsman. The more I think about that the more uncomfortable I feel -- though Anna is free of that disturbing power (but then, she's a perpetual child), and so is David's mother (although the bit with kissing her corpse could ring a little oddly, and her coaxing voice leading him astray, and the whole dead Madonna thing she has going on). David's step-mother is maybe the most positive: he sees her negatively, but comes to understand her better and try harder to get along with her.

Anyway, those points didn't stop me enjoying the story quite a lot, but it's worth thinking about.

Oh, and after reading other reviews and so on, I decided to skip the 150 pages of analysis that Connolly includes. I'm aware of pretty much all the fairytales mentioned, so I don't need the background, and I preferred on reflection to let the story stand alone. I'm a postgrad lit student, I don't need Connolly to do the work for me... ...more

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Mar 12, 2012 Suz rated it it was amazing

Shelves: book-club, award-winner, fantasy, fairytale, library

This is easily one of the best books I've ever read. It's just fucking genius. The writing was phenomenal.

David, a 12 year old boy who loves his books, loses his mother. He gets lost in the world that's slowly evolving around him - there's a great war going on, his father is moving on with his life, and, well he's an angry 12 year old boy. His mother has been taken from him, a usurper is trying to take her place, and he's being replaced with a half sibling. This book is largely about his grief a This is easily one of the best books I've ever read. It's just fucking genius. The writing was phenomenal.

David, a 12 year old boy who loves his books, loses his mother. He gets lost in the world that's slowly evolving around him - there's a great war going on, his father is moving on with his life, and, well he's an angry 12 year old boy. His mother has been taken from him, a usurper is trying to take her place, and he's being replaced with a half sibling. This book is largely about his grief and loss and coming to terms with them.

In the middle of all of this he falls into a fantasy world that is a world made by the minds of those that have come before him, and to some sense, himself. The stories he grew up reading are real, and they're ugly. All of those dark fairy tales (that are all dark if you ignore the Disneyfication) are made even darker, and it's absolutely delicious. There's sex, death, child abuse, torture, power grabs, communist collectives, gluttony... Everything that makes those old folk tales scary... and awesome.

Connolly does a great job of writing a distraught child, that I can personally feel for. David loses his mother at 12. I lost my mother at 11. David's father (in a few months) starts seeing someone who was involved in her caretaking. My father also married one of my dead mother's caretakers. David is bitter and angry and lost at life and having a hard time finding his way, and it was written as real as I remember it being for me. Through the heartbreaking journey, either I sympathized with David too much and got sucked in, or Connolly just wrote it damn well, and it was easy to be sucked in.

The fantasy land was fantastic. It was dark, and it was dangerous. And through it, David grew up, not too much, but enough. There are hints at things just beyond his knowledge that he can't (or won't quite) recognize, but in the end he became a better person for what he went through. He learns he can understands and can accept life's changes.

I love re-imagined fairy/folk tales, and this is easy one of my more favorite books with that element. The blending of the dark tales and the coming of age was wonderful. Definitely not a kid's book, but definitely awesome. ...more

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Feb 26, 2008 Michelle rated it it was amazing

Shelves: book_club, fairy-tales, myths-fables, books-about-books

Somewhen during WWII, there was a boy on the verge of young manhood whose mother died. His grief understandably made him perhaps just a little mad, or else opened a gap between his world and the next; either way, his nightmares were made incarnate, and he set off to understand them, if not outright do battle with them.

Connolly is more known for his detective fiction, but his infrequent fantasy novels (this one and 2009's The Gates) come highly recommended to me, and I now find myself wondering ...more

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