ven though I ended up hating this novel, I actually liked the first third of the book. In the beginning, Emilie meets Jeremy, who is famous tracker of lost women and girls, he has found
50 missing women and 14 bodies. On page 12 Jeremy explains to an
interviewer that he can only find women and girls because they "get lost differently". No matter how they have disappeared, or how cold the trail, Jeremy can
find them (assuming that "they want to be found" - and apparently dead bodies and lost medallions want to be found.) Emilie wants Jeremy to find her long-lost half sister Shannon, who disappeared into the West Virginia woods 20 years ago. The same
woods that Jeremy and his buddy disappeared into 15 years ago when they were just teenagers. But Jeremy and Rafe returned after a six month disappearance, whereas half-sister Shannon has never been seen again.
One thing I hated about the writing of The Lost Story was Shaffer inserting a bunch of short chapters called "Storyteller Corner" into the novel. The Storyteller Corners are scattered throughout the novel.
Shaffer keeps breaking into the narrative with these brief chapters to point something out or to explain some nuance of the plot point you may have missed. These interruptions
are quite damaging to the flow of the story, they remind the reader that they just reading a book. The Storyteller Corners are quite intrusive and I think Shaffer made a bad decision to use them in her book.
I felt that a good editor would have gently suggested to Shaffer that her story would stronger
without all of these pointless interrupts.
My biggest complaint about the first portion of the book is that it takes forever for Rafe, Jeremy and Emilie to cross over to the other kingdom. It's not until page 129 (out of 322 total pages)
that our heroes FINALLY get to the magical kingdom of Shanandoah. Yet my delight that our heroes finally crossed into the magical world quickly turned to despair when the story turned awful. The novel doesn't merely go downhill, it plunges off a cliff.
Once the fantasy world is entered, Shaffer takes the attitude that anything (literally anything) can happen in a fantasy story, so there is no need for logic or plausibility. The characters all act stupidly. The plot requires them to do pointless things. The
evil Bright Boys exist merely to be evil villains. My spoiler section lists a few of the many stomach-churning events from The Lost Story. This book becomes so bad it is epically awful.
It amazes me that such a terrible book generated positive reviews. The Lost Story finished eighth on the
Goodreads list of Best fantasy novels of 2024.
Bookpage gave The Lost Story a starred review.
NPR included it on its list of best SF & Fantasy books of 2024. All of these reviews mention the Chronicles of Narnia. "The Lost Story is
the spiritual epilogue to C. S. Lewis' Narnia."
I haven't read any of the Narnia stories since I was a kid, and now I wonder - if I reread them as an adult, would I discover them just as awful as the The Lost Story? Are the
Chronicles of Narnia full of dumb characters doing stupid things in a pointless plot, and as I child I simply didn't notice? Some books for children are still wonderful when read by an adult:
The Chronicles of Prydain, The Mouse and Motorcycle, The Phantom Tollbooth, and of course The Hobbit. Are the Narnia books are appealing to adults? If they are anything
like The Lost Story then they are miserable tales indeed. If anyone who reads this review has read the Narnia books as an adult, please leave a comment saying whether they are actually good or bad, I dare not go back myself
to reread them, I don't want to discover that they are actually awful.
I have done my best to warn you about The Lost Story. Proceed accordingly.
*** Warning - Spoilers below ***
This is only a partial list of the many truly awful examples of writing from The Lost Story
We learn that the magical kingdom of Shanandoah doesn't make any sense because it was the invention of a thirteen year old girl. Shaffer apparently used that as a license to write any nonsense that appeared in her head. Thus our first glimpse of Shanandoah is this description:
"If he could trust his eyes, then these trees soared a thousand feet too tall. But they weren't like the pictures he had seen of the sequoias in California. Those were ancient and massive evergreens. These trees had leaves every color of Easter - pink and green
and blue and yellow and white. They looked liked the trees he might have scribbled as a child, five different fat Crayola markers to color one tree. Yes, these were a child's imaginary trees made real somehow." Trees over 1000' tall with pastel colored leaves?? Uh, okay...
There is an absolutely ridiculous scene on page 191 where Jeremy tells Rafe that he shot an arrow just above Queen Skya's head in order to kill an ultra-deadly sleeper spider. How did Queen Skya know that there was a deadly spider above her
head and that if she moved it would bite and kill her? Why was Rafe carrying his bow and arrows indoors? Despite the imminent danger, Rafe paused to fletch an arrow with feathers from the red crow all the while Queen Skya is standing there motionless beneath a deadly spider
(why not just use an arrow already in his quiver?) As a reward for making the
impossible arrow shot to kill the spider, Queen Skya gifted Rafe "dominion over birds. Give a bird an order and it will obey you - in this world or any other." I was astounded. Where did Queen Skya get such godlike power?! That offhand mention of such incredible power real bothered
me. If Queen Skya can grant such gifts, she really is a god. (Dominion over birds apparently means that Rafe's touch is good
enough to heal a robin wounded by a hawk's attack.)
On page 211, Granny Apple makes Rafe and Jeremy repeat back her warnings about the dangers of Ghost Town. "Don't believe your eyes", Jeremy and Rafe repeated. "Stay together". So what happens on page 215? They split up! Rafe climbs alone into
the Angel Window of Ghost Town. That is the plot point that infuriated me the most. Rafe and Jeremy have the brains of a goldfish. Chapter 27 convinced me that this was a horrible story. From that point on, I wished that Rafe and Jeremy would die horrible deaths because
they were too stupid to live. What happens when Jeremy enters Ghost Town? He sees an illusion of his father who says mean things to him. What did Granny Apple just tell them? "Don't believe your eyes". I wanted to smack this book over Jeremy's empty head, but unfortunately
there are no brains inside to knock any sense into. Rafe is just as witless. He and Jeremy cross a bridge in Ghost Town. Rafe looks down and sees an illusion of Jeremy in the water below the bridge with an arrow stuck in him. Rafe wonders if the illusion really is Jeremy, despite the
fact that Jeremy is standing right there on the #$!&*# bridge talking to him!!
Somehow Emilie gets captured by the Bright Boys. Perhaps I dozed off, because the last thing I remember was that Queen Skya had Emelie with her for protection. Emilie is supposed to give Rafe the message to shoot only one arrow - but why is
this important? Queen Skya appears on the rooftop and shoots all the Bright Boys full of arrows - she could have done that whether Rafe had one arrow or ten. Indeed, if Rafe had ten arrows he could have shot some Bright Boys also.
On page 232, the Bright Boys have tightly bound Jeremy's wrists with electrical cord. Electrical cord? The magical kingdom of Shanandoah doesn't have electricity, they uses torches, horses, fireplaces - it is a medieval level technology.
Why would there be electrical cords available for binding?
On page 314 we read: "Jeremy had gotten in late last night. He'd driven six straight hours from New York, where he'd helped locate a boy who'd wandered away from his family hiking the Appalachian Trail." So much for Jeremy only being
able to locate women and girls because "they get lost differently". This is an example of the lazy ass effort Shaffer put into writing this book.
Page 219: "The colors of the houses, once white or blue or yellow or green, had all faded to a sickly grey. Something had eaten a large hole in the side of the big white house on the corner." So all of the houses are sickly grey, except that
one of the sickly grey houses is actually white? Jeremy runs off to hide in the blue house, even though all the houses are sickly grey.
Page 226: "An ax flew past them and the blade struck a tree. Sap, thick and red as blood and smelling of copper poured from the trunk like an open wound. Rafe wanted to run but was frozen in place. A Bright Boy stood ten feet away dressed in
ragged graveclothes and smelling of dead things. He strode to the tree and pulled the ax from the trunk. The blade glistened brown and wet." What? If the tree is spilling blood-red sap, why is the ax blade glistening brown??
There is some cringe worthy description or plot point on almost every page. There are many more examples I could have included here. I admit that by the end of the book I was skimming. I just wanted the The Lost Story to end. At least I now know to never read another Meg Shaffer book again.
