The Book of Lost Things

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A few chapters in, when the main character left reality for the parallel fantasy world, I wasn't sure this magical atmosphere would hold. I sort of felt bad for this book as I really thought it had no shot of being anything more than a diversionary “get my head back together” rebound novel. A hybrid between coming of age in difficult times and pure fantasy delight, full of fractured fairytales and real problems to be dealt with, this is a perfect example of young adult fiction for all ages.

John Connolly’s 2006 revisionist fantasy will draw many comparisons due to it’s fable / mythical themes. I would recommend it to everyone, because i feel like it's something that must be read at least once in our lives. There is a disgusting Snow White and seven suffering dwarfs in a comedy side show - a break entertainment of sorts.They felt familiar but at the same time strange because after all these years of not reading them and then revisiting them now, it seemed to me that they were telling a different story that exhibited deeper reason than how I perceived them when I was just a child. Deep in his depression, he begins to hear voices coming out of the books he and his mum used to read together. High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother, with only the books on his shelf for company.

but those are aberrations; despite them, Connolly more than succeeds in creating delightful and intriguing reinterprations of figures from fairy and folk tale.Connolly succeeds in creating a psychological examination of a young mind under stress and dealing with some heavy issues while also telling a pretty good fantasy story. The real story ends up being David's abduction into the land of fairy tales by the Crooked Man, a Rumpelstiltskin who makes vicious bargains with emotional children to feed his magical slave house.

Memento mori, a Latin phrase translated as "Remember your mortality", "Remember you must die" or "Remember you will die".we have an entire company of Big Bad Wolves, reconfigured as ambitious wolf-men, born of a grotesquely slutty Little Red Hood and sprung from the nightmares of a juvenile king. He is fiendish, horrifying, diabolical, wicked, cruel, savage, monstrous, malicious, inhuman, infernal. an eerie vignette that is a model of careful, suspenseful writing, featuring unearthly quiet, child-like flowers, a a taciturn Woodsman, the smoking remains of the german bomber, bleeding trees, a house in the woods with a Giger-like exterior, and a gathering of evil wolfish beings. John Connolly has a vivid imagination with brilliant characters and creates a fun re-appropriation of beloved fairy tales.

Take all your favourite fairy tales from your childhood(from odd mixture of Wizard of Oz to Labyrinth to The Never Ending Story to the most sadistic part of Grimm's Fairy Tales), now throw in some well known poems and mix together with a story of a child coming to terms with the death of a parent. and i absolutely ADORED David, all his flaws made him more relatable and more human, in this story I believe we follow him in a journey of finding himself rather than finding his mother .

I don't look at this book the way some readers apparently have: as sci-fi or fantasy, but instead see it as showing the redemptive power of books and stories in children's and adults' lives. Although London was the central target, many other cities with munitions factories and storage facilities were also targeted.