Review: The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer

The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer

Blurb from Goodreads:

Inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, this wild and wondrous novel is a fairy tale for grown-ups who still knock on the back of wardrobes—just in case—from the author of The Wishing Game.

As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell went missing in a vast West Virginia state forest, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived.

Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Rafe is a reclusive artist who still bears scars inside and out but has no memory of what happened during those months. Meanwhile, Jeremy has become a famed missing persons’ investigator. With his uncanny abilities, he is the one person who can help vet tech Emilie Wendell find her sister, who vanished in the very same forest as Rafe and Jeremy.

Jeremy alone knows the fantastical truth about the disappearances, for while the rest of the world was searching for them, the two missing boys were in a magical realm filled with impossible beauty and terrible danger. He believes it is there that they will find Emilie’s sister. However, Jeremy has kept Rafe in the dark since their return for his own inscrutable reasons. But the time for burying secrets comes to an end as the quest for Emilie’s sister begins. The former lost boys must confront their shared past, no matter how traumatic the memories.

Alongside the headstrong Emilie, Rafe and Jeremy must return to the enchanted world they called home for six months—for only then can they get back everything and everyone they’ve lost.

My Review:

This was delightful. I LOVED this author's debut last year and this was definitely a similar vibe! I did find it to be a bit odd but not in a bad way and also a bit long but if you are in the mood for some fantasy/magical realism, this will be the book for you!! 

The Lost Story comes out next week on July 16, 2024, and you can purchase HERE!  

When you read fairy tales, you'll learn fast there are only two types of mothers you'll meet in those stories. One-good and dead. Two-bad and alive.

Fathers usually fare better. They live longer.

However, without their wives around, they tend to make very poor decisions. Snow White had a good and dead mother. Then her father remarried her wicked stepmother. Cinderella's father also exercised very poor taste when looking for wife number two.

The father in "Rumpelstiltskin" took parental bragging to a whole new level when he swore to all who would listen that his daughter could spin straw into gold. One imagines if his wife had been alive, she would have quickly shut those rumors down by explaining to all and sundry that she'd married a narcissist.