The Book of Lost Things / John Connolly

Genre: Fantasy Main characters: David, The Crooked Man Summary: David is an ordinary child living an ordinary life until his mother dies, when he starts hearing books whispering. Few months after David’s mom’s death, his father starts dating a new woman, Rose. In time the two get married, have a baby and move together (and David too) in an old house near London, a house that’s been in Rose’s family for years. David, who keeps resenting the new comers into his and his father’s life, is given a room filled with books, a room that has belonged to a great-uncle of Rose’s, Jonathan. This Jonathan has vanished from home when he was just a kid, together with another little girl, and no one knew what happened to them. David’s life is getting stranger and stranger, as he keeps having glimpses of a faraway land, with forests and castles, and he also keeps seeing a guy with a crooked back (whom he started to refer to in his mind as The Crooked Man). One night David thinks he hears his mother’s voice telling him to come rescue her from that faraway land and, his heart filled with hope, he follows the voice to an abandoned garden, he enters and… he finds himself transported in that world he kept seeing, a twisted fairytale world as imagined by that Jonathan of long ago (though of course David doesn’t know it yet). The woods are filled with dangerous things, but luckily David encounters a Woodsman, a guy who tells him about a book (The Book of Lost Things) that the king has lost and that maybe can help him find his way back home. So David starts making his way to the king’s castle, in a world fraught with perils — only to discover at the end of his way that the book held no value but for the king himself.

I really loved the way the author talked of David: we can see him as a resentful child at first (and of course, we can understand him, after all his mother is gone and someone else is in her place, another kid taking the place of David himself — or so he sees it). A child scared when discovering a new world, a dangerous world he knows nothing about, but filled with hope he would find his mother (though in his heart of hearts he does know his mother is dead and gone) and things will go back being what they once were. A child growing up and becoming braver with each passing adventure — growing up and realizing things aren’t all in black and white, things at his house aren’t as bad as he sees them. A child who never let his fears get the best of him (I’m in doubt here whether I would have preferred David to act just a little more scared than he was, just to make him even more believable — but no, I think he was just fine :) ).

I was expecting to see Rose as the usurping step-mother type, treating David badly and so all. But she was a total surprise, she was nice and kind and couldn’t have treated David better if he had been her own child — Rose was definitely one of my favorite characters in the whole book. The Woodsman has made me think of Robert Neville in I Am Legend — living in a little house as secure as possible and going out to kill things (not vampires but wolf-men) just to make the world around a little safer. Roland has made me think of a character in another book(s) too — he made me think of Diana Gabaldon’s Lord John: so noble, so just, capable of deep love (only they both aimed their feelings at men, a thing which made them both somehow vulnerable in their time and age).

We meet a lot of twisted stories as Jonathan had sort of a dark mind, devising different darker variations of the already existing ones. For example the wolf-men (the Loups, as they were called) were the result of the new version of the Little Red Riding Hood’s story, where the little girl grows up, turns into a woman and falls in love with a wolf, bearing his children, a mixed breed. My favorite such story was the one of the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The Dwarfs are now communists and their names are Comrade Brother Number One, Comrade Brother Number Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Eight (Comrade Brother Number Seven has run off to work at their mother’s bakery, and the other brothers never mention him as he turned into a capitalist betraying the cause :P ). The Dwarfs are absolutely terrified by Snow White, a huge woman, and they have even tried to poison her and set the blame on her evil mother,but they miscalculated the dose so when a prince came and kissed Snow White she woke up (and gave the prince a piece of her mind about kissing total strangers so the poor thing has run away as fast as he could). The poor dwarfs have only one hope left: they keep working in their diamond mine in hopes they’ll raise a large enough pile to convince someone to marry Snow White and take her away :P

The author seems to have a small penchant for French. “Loup” in French is “wolf”. Leroi (“the beast who would be king”) had a predestined name too — “le roi” means “the king” in French.

What I liked most: Everything!! I have enjoyed the whole book tremendously, from the twisted fairytales to The Crooked Man’s way of prolonging his life to the way David discovered how loved he really was. Simply everything.

What I liked least: I have to say I didn’t quite understand how the woman in the Fortress of Thorns had died :( (but that’s probably my fault). Also, I was a bit sad when Rose and David’s father had divorced, as they were both good people and really deserved to be happy.

Recommend it? With a resounding “yes!!!” :)

A quote:

Before she became ill, David’s mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren’t alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. People were alive whether you chose to notice them or not, while dogs tended to make you notice them if they decided that you weren’t paying them enough attention. Cats, meanwhile, were very good at pretending people didn’t exist at all when it suited them, but that was another matter entirely.

Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination, and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David’s mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.

Another review
The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly @ The Hidden Side of a Leaf

The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.