“We carry our childhood, the good and the bad of it, into our adult lives. In that way, we’re never very far from the children we once were,” (Connolly 212).
Eight-year-old Phoebe lies comatose in a hospital bed with her mother, Ceres, close by her side, reading the fairy tales her daughter loved. But as the long days beside Phoebe’s bedside with no sign that her daughter will ever return to her, Ceres is starting to lose hope. But the old house by the hospital is calling to her, and with it a story Ceres finds herself tumbling into.
Imagine your favourite book. I don’t care what it is, just think about it. Think about why you love it, how dear it is to your heart. Now imagine the author has announced a sequel (assuming your beloved book is a standalone). Do you feel that excitement? That chance of returning to the world of the story? Now imagine getting that book surprisingly fast from your local library, diving right in, and being completely disappointed.
That’s what happened when I read The Land of Lost Things.
The Book of Lost Things is one of my favourite books. I read it fresh off of the death of my mom, so naturally it was triggering in some ways, but it was that sadness, that deep heart of the novel that made me love the book so much. I love portal fiction, I think it’s a genre that can so expertly navigate trauma (specifically childhood trauma) by escaping into other worlds (usually fantastical and magic filled) and usually either coming to terms or learning to cope through their adventures. Some of my favourite examples of portal fiction, including The Book of Lost Things, are The Neverending Story and Labyrinth). It’s what made The Book of Lost Things so special, the honesty, the hurt, the lesson that even though we can escape to fantasy worlds through fiction we can never really escape the hurt of life, only find ways to cope with it. And The Land of Lost Things failed to show every part of that, and in many ways ruined what was a perfect story.
There was so much potential. The mythological references are fairly obvious (Ceres being the name of the Roman equivalent to Demetre in Greek mythology, making her daughter Phoebe Proserpina/Persephone), and I thought that Phoebe as a comatose child was a brilliant adaptation of the Persephone myth. I thought I’d had the story figured out by then: a mirroring of the original story in which Ceres travels to Elsewhere in the hopes of brining her daughter to the land of the living. I expected an Underworld type of journey (the word is used when Ceres travels underground, as well as Ceres being offered food to eat once there), a quest because the first book followed a quest narrative (and if you’re going to refer to mythology you should stick with it), but instead of keeping the mythology references heavy with a fairy tale twist, Connolly chose to add actual Fae. I’ve never been a fan of stories with fae, they just don’t spark my interest, and trying to combine fae with mythology just didn’t work.
The plot is just boring, and as another reviewer mentioned it speed runs through The Book of Lost Things and then completely ruins the tragically beautiful ending of it’s predecessor. Ceres is an uninteresting protagonist, a thirty-two-year-old woman who finds herself in the body of her sixteen-year-old self without much explanation (aside from the above quote). And I think I understand Connolly’s reasoning, he pays homage to it in his dedication by paraphrasing C.W. Lewis’s infamous, “Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” I get it, but not enough attention was given to this quote to make it work. Calio was an interesting enough character, but the fae were just villainous despite Connolly repeatedly telling readers that the fae weren’t good or bad, they just treated people as if they were disposable (Kyubey did it better). The Crooked Man lost what made him terrifying, and the heart was squeezed out of what was a beautiful standalone.
Despite how disappointed I was by this book, it is well-written. Connolly continues to be a talented writer and the book itself is very quotable. Readers who haven’t read The Book of Lost Things and enjoy fae stories will probably love this.
I wish I never knew this book existed. If anything, I’m going to work hard to purge it from my memory. But I know I’m going to struggle to enjoy The Book of Lost Things when I re-read it again, knowing that Connolly completely took away the beauty of his original novel.
Publication: September 7th 2023
Publisher: Atria
Pages: 358 pages (Hardcover)
Source: Owned
Genre: Fiction, Fantasy
My Rating: ⛤⛤
Summary:
Twice upon a time – for that is how some stories should continue . . .
Phoebe, an eight-year-old girl, lies comatose following a car accident. She is a body without a spirit, a stolen child. Ceres, her mother, can only sit by her bedside and read aloud to Phoebe the fairy stories she loves in the hope they might summon her back to this world.
But it is hard to keep faith, so very hard.
Now an old house on the hospital grounds, a property connected to a book written by a vanished author, is calling to Ceres. Something wants her to enter, and to journey – to a land coloured by the memories of Ceres’s childhood, and the folklore beloved of her father, to a land of witches and dryads, giants and mandrakes; to a land where old enemies are watching, and waiting.
Sarah O'Connor 