The Book Of Lost Things – John Connolly – Book Review #31

The Book Of Lost Things

I wanted a change from the thrillers/crime/police books I’ve been reading lately and The Book Of Lost Things was a total change.  When I picked it up at the charity shop and read the blurb I thought it was a book aimed at young adults.

It’s not.

Dark & Twisted

It’s a dark and twisted tale of a 12-year-old boy called David whose mother gets sick and dies. He takes solace in his books but they start to whisper to him.

Here’s the blurb from Goodreads:

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 books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness. Angry and alone, he takes refuge in his imagination and soon finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a world that is a strange reflection of his own — populated by heroes and monsters and ruled by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book, The Book of Lost Things.

Gruesome

The story was surprisingly gruesome in places. One part that sticks in my mind is when a deer runs into the clearing beneath the tree that David had climbed to eat some apples. He looks down as the deer looks up at him but instead of a normal head, it has the head of a little girl with blonde hair and green eyes. She looks up at him and says, ‘Help me, please’. He hears a noise, as does she and she bounds off. I expected her to get away.

She didn’t.

She got shot in the neck with an arrow and died. The hunter turned out to be a woman who captured David and took him back to her cottage. She told him how she caught children and animals then used a potion to put human heads on the animals.

Not For Young Adults!

I won’t say any more because I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice to say, this is definitely not aimed at young adults!

The lovely book cover drew me to the book and when I flicked through the pages I loved the little drawings under each chapter title:

I really enjoyed it and will be looking out for more by this author.