David’s character arc is realistic and pretty gratifying by the end–it’s for the most part believable. It’s the characters that really move the story along more than the setting and storyline. THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS is about young David, whose journey to a grim fairytale land becomes the adventure of a lifetime. I found the prose a little clunky and lacking subtlety but again, most 12-year-olds won’t care. The author, John Connolly, is Irish and that flavors his writing style and prose. The storyline is super basic, I pretty much told you what the plot is already–sorry if that’s a spoiler, but there’s not much I can do about that–a kid running from peril to peril on his journey to the king. These aren’t the kinds of things that will trip up most middle grade readers, who are the target audience. Connelly does a middling job explaining what things are and why they are–it would’ve been nice to know a little more because I was left with a lot of questions throughout the book.

It felt like the world full of dark corners and very little that was bright and happy. The majority of the book takes place in a forest, filled with cursed creatures, villagers whose lives are threatened, and monsters that could eat David for breakfast.

The story moves at a consistent pace, despite a great deal of worldbuilding as David moves through this alternate universe. But the odds of David surviving the journey are pretty low. He must find his way to the king and the book of lost things in order to find his way home. The story follows David’s adventures as he works his way through this fairytale realm, meeting a woodsman, big bad wolves, knights on horseback, and a plethora of vivid and terrifying characters. There he meets The Crooked Man face-to-face.

One fateful night, David inadvertently finds a doorway to an alternate world, where fairytales are grim, dark, and deadly. He calls this sinister character The Crooked Man and is wary of his motivations. One day David discovers an intruder in his house, but no one believes him. There the books have begun to whisper to him, and his imagination begins to take on a realism of its own. David doesn’t like these changes and hides himself away in his bedroom. So begins THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS by John Connelly, the story of a 12-year-old boy who tries to escape a life of trauma and disappointment only to discover that fairytales aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.Įarly on in the book David loses his mother, his father remarries, and has a child with his new wife, Rose. Once upon a time, there was a boy named David, and he did everything to keep his mother alive.

The book of lost things book