The Book of Lost Things

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

Category: Fantasy Grade: B-

This is pretty standard post-Potter, coming-of-age fantasy novel. It's well written and it got of to a terrific start with a wrenching, emotional portrait of a young boy who believes that his obsessive-compulsive routines might keep his dying mother alive. The closing of the book is also a beautiful contrast to the usual "happily ever after". While I picked this one up thinking this was a book aimed at the Potter crowd, it's definitely a far more adult story that it seemed from the book jacket.

The rest of the book isn't bad. If you'd never read any other fantasy novels or seen other fantasy movies, it would have been perfectly enjoyable. The problem with it is that Connolly has borrowed plot devices from so many other sources that, after a while, it just gets both distracting and annoying. Maybe he was going for homage, but it comes across as just derivative. The basic crossing to another world comes from the Narnia series. The first character the boy comes across in the new world is the Woodsman -- an over sized man with an isolated cabin who is more comfortable in the world of trees and animals than people - can everybody say Hagrid? There are talking animals a la the Pullman series (if you don't know Pullman's work you will when the first of the movies "The Golden Compass" comes out in the fall). Most blatantly, Connolly takes major chunks from the Wizard of Oz -- the Woodsman is much like the Tin Man, there's a "white stone road" that will take the hero to the "king" who will know how to get him home - there's even a gang of harpies who behave exactly like the flying monkeys!

Very unoriginal.