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Review
'The book's epic villainy, mournful tone and tested morality is the essence of Connolly. Worst of all is the Crooked Man, who ranks with the Travelling Man, the Collector and even Mr Pudd among Connolly's most memorable villains. 'THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS is peculiar and perverse and humane, with an incredibly lyrical finale . . . The novel should earn the author new readers.'
(The Irish Times )'Brilliantly creepy coming of age novel'
(Mirror )'A powerful, powerful writer. I got a very real chill down my spine. This is an amazing book.'
(Jeffery Deaver )'Charming, disturbing and outrageously imaginative. A tremendously exciting change of pace.'
(Lawrence Jackson, Producer of BBC Radio 4's adaptations of John Connolly's short stories )'The book is beautifully written ... It is obviously the product of someone with a very powerful imagination'
(Newbooks Magazine )'John Connolly has a cult following for his crime novel and can clearly plot twists and turns. He has applied that talent to his own life by producing a very different book... a highly original novel using stories that we all know. But think twice before reading his version of Hansel and Gretel to your kids'
(Times )Review
"* 'Seldom has a thriller writer been so adept at turning the screw yet further and evoking a sense of awful dread among his landscapes and tormented characters. Colourful but visceral grand guignol, and definitely not to be read at night.' - Maxim Jakubowski, Guardian on The Black Angel * 'Connolly has made a name for himself specialising in darkness, and THE BLACK ANGEL is no exception. Five Star.' - Daily Mirror on The Black Angel * 'Connolly has virtually no match when it comes to chilling his readers.' - Daily Express on The Black Angel * 'There is a precision to the horrors... that make them one of the few sequences to have found anything interesting to say about serial killers since Thomas Harris.' - Independent on The Black Angel"
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
45 of 47 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Once again this author has hit the mark of great story telling. This is a story of a young boy(David) who loses his mother and has to adjust to life without her. His father eventually re-marries and they are soon joined by a new half brother. David, feeling left out retreats into a world of books and stories.
When they all move into his stepmothers house, things become rather strange.
David finds a hole in the garden wall which transports him to a magical fairy tale like land of werewolves,trolls and the evil crooked man.
I don't want to divulge too much of the plot, so I'll just say that this story is a fantastic mix of fairy tale and horror. Much like the Brothers Grimm film, this story contains a collection of the famous fairy tales all coming together in the fast paced adventure. That is the only similarity as 'The Book of Lost Things'was a far supperior story.
Not knowing the premise of this book, I thought it would be another action/thriller type book like his others. I have enjoyed all of J.C.'s books, but this one has been the most amazing story yet. It may have been very different to the Charlie Parker books, but it still shared the same dark tone that all his books follow.
This was one of those books I had a hard time putting down.
When they all move into his stepmothers house, things become rather strange.
David finds a hole in the garden wall which transports him to a magical fairy tale like land of werewolves,trolls and the evil crooked man.
I don't want to divulge too much of the plot, so I'll just say that this story is a fantastic mix of fairy tale and horror. Much like the Brothers Grimm film, this story contains a collection of the famous fairy tales all coming together in the fast paced adventure. That is the only similarity as 'The Book of Lost Things'was a far supperior story.
Not knowing the premise of this book, I thought it would be another action/thriller type book like his others. I have enjoyed all of J.C.'s books, but this one has been the most amazing story yet. It may have been very different to the Charlie Parker books, but it still shared the same dark tone that all his books follow.
This was one of those books I had a hard time putting down.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a lovely book. It takes teenager David on an adventure through a fantasy world and a journey along the path from childhood to adulthood. In some ways it reads like a reworking of Wizard of Oz, except that the different aspects of David's personality are integrated in one person (unlike Dorothy's, which appear externally - in the scarecrow, the lion and the tin man). All the same, David has to develop and learn to use cunning/brains (when he solves the riddle of the two bridges), strength and courage (when he defeats the monster in the village), and, hardest of all, love for his step family, before he can defeat his enemies and return home. There are references to various fairy tales and nursery rhymes - some of them twisted and quite dark.
I've marked it down to 4 stars because, for me at least, it reads like teen fiction - it's basically a thriller given a fantasy setting and a little bit of a message - and this book doesn't match up to the best of fantasy fiction (eg the Narnia books, or Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials Trilogy). The material is rich enough to carry so much more. For instance we could have been asked to question (just a little) our notions of right and wrong - ie is it always "good" to kill our enemies? Without wanting to give the end away, it would have been nice to have been left with a question mark over whether the ending was really "morally right".
I've marked it down to 4 stars because, for me at least, it reads like teen fiction - it's basically a thriller given a fantasy setting and a little bit of a message - and this book doesn't match up to the best of fantasy fiction (eg the Narnia books, or Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials Trilogy). The material is rich enough to carry so much more. For instance we could have been asked to question (just a little) our notions of right and wrong - ie is it always "good" to kill our enemies? Without wanting to give the end away, it would have been nice to have been left with a question mark over whether the ending was really "morally right".
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
In this stand-alone novel Connolly has adapted or taken extracts from a number of classical fairy tales to create one story, which in common with The Chronicles of Narnia takes place in Second World War England and involves a secret portal to a magical mystery land with battles of its own being fought and involving half-human, half-animal hybrids. While on the one hand it's tempting to suggest that this is purely an indulgence on the author's part, there's no denying that it's well written and the imagery and atmosphere he creates - so often a Connolly strength - is probably his best to date because he has given himself free rein to fantasise as much as he wants to.
In my own paperback copy, an unusual supplement to an already unusual book includes an `interview' with Connolly in which he is asked such questions as why he wrote the tale at all. I won't spoil things here, but I do find it curious that the novelist finds a need to justify the writing of a story and to publish those reasons in the book itself. Not that it matters, it takes a little while adjusting to the nature of the story after the very different style of the Charlie `Bird' Parker series but once the reader becomes familiar with it, it makes for entertaining reading. Despite its fairy-tale underpinnings, however, this is not a story for young children; there is no bad language at any time but some of the violence, while pretty tame compared to traditional Connolly fare, would make for an uncomfortable bedtime story for your seven-year-old daughter! But at least Connolly has eradicated the gun from one of his novels as a means of killing; he has always delved into the supernatural world even when writing modern day crime fiction, but in the past even some of the ghosts he created killed with pistols or rifles, which I found at odds with the theme. Not in this book, though. Central character David has nothing more sophisticated than a sword at his side and this is perfectly in keeping with the strange world he inhabits for much of this tale.
Another frequent idiosyncrasy throughout several of Connolly's novels is to give the bad guy a title of some kind, in TBOLT he's The Crooked Man who is very loosely adapted from the Brothers Grimm's dwarf creation Rumpelstiltskin. And with central character David having a conversation with a woman who turns out to be dead, we are reminded once again that there are more similarities to the Bird series than initially meets the eye. Still left-field by most reckonings, and certainly not crime fiction, it's an adult fairy tale that will satisfy existing Connolly fans and for those of you lucky enough not to know, there's a wonderful series of novels by the same author that you really should try if you want a credible mixture of contemporary fiction and the supernatural.
In my own paperback copy, an unusual supplement to an already unusual book includes an `interview' with Connolly in which he is asked such questions as why he wrote the tale at all. I won't spoil things here, but I do find it curious that the novelist finds a need to justify the writing of a story and to publish those reasons in the book itself. Not that it matters, it takes a little while adjusting to the nature of the story after the very different style of the Charlie `Bird' Parker series but once the reader becomes familiar with it, it makes for entertaining reading. Despite its fairy-tale underpinnings, however, this is not a story for young children; there is no bad language at any time but some of the violence, while pretty tame compared to traditional Connolly fare, would make for an uncomfortable bedtime story for your seven-year-old daughter! But at least Connolly has eradicated the gun from one of his novels as a means of killing; he has always delved into the supernatural world even when writing modern day crime fiction, but in the past even some of the ghosts he created killed with pistols or rifles, which I found at odds with the theme. Not in this book, though. Central character David has nothing more sophisticated than a sword at his side and this is perfectly in keeping with the strange world he inhabits for much of this tale.
Another frequent idiosyncrasy throughout several of Connolly's novels is to give the bad guy a title of some kind, in TBOLT he's The Crooked Man who is very loosely adapted from the Brothers Grimm's dwarf creation Rumpelstiltskin. And with central character David having a conversation with a woman who turns out to be dead, we are reminded once again that there are more similarities to the Bird series than initially meets the eye. Still left-field by most reckonings, and certainly not crime fiction, it's an adult fairy tale that will satisfy existing Connolly fans and for those of you lucky enough not to know, there's a wonderful series of novels by the same author that you really should try if you want a credible mixture of contemporary fiction and the supernatural.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Great fun
The main protagonist is 12 year old David; he has just lost his mother who has been ill. After having his world turned upside down by his father's remarriage and the birth of his... Read more
Published 6 months ago by J. Willis
A must-read for all literary fans!!!!!!
My wife introduced this book to me on holiday, and it was the first book I had read since leaving school. Read more
Published 7 months ago by westendboy
Grimly ever after
I found "The Book of Lost Things" to be a work of genius in places but flawed in others so overall I can't give it more that three stars. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Secret Spi
Impossible to put down
I found The Book Of Lost Things to be one of the hardest books to put down that i have ever read. Connolly's use of the fairytales we all know are so meticulously twisted and... Read more
Published 13 months ago by JakeM
Pedestrian not Magical
Read this as it had been suggested by a member of our Reading Group. I struggled with the first 100 pages and was mildly amused by some of the re-workings of classical fairy tales... Read more
Published 16 months ago by Michael D. Clayson
Not great
The Book of Lost Things tells the story of David; a young boy growing up in London during the Second World War. His mother dies and his father remarries shortly after. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Code Hero
Performed beyond my expectations
Where do I start with this book? Another red and white book I've read recently I wasn't so enamoured with (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell), so I was a little leery of The Book of... Read more
Published 17 months ago by serialdeviant
a wandering tale that leads nowhere
I wanted to like this book - cover art, title and premise were fine, and up to the point where the boy is lost in another world I was engaged - themes of sibling rivalry and... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Mr. Christopher Ball
A fun story for big kids
Take all your favourite fairy tales from your childhood, throw in some well known poems and mix together with a story of a child coming to terms with the death of a parent. Read more
Published 18 months ago by simon211175
One of the best
I loved this book. That doesn't seem a strong enough statement somehow. This book is in my top 5 ever and I'm an avid reader. Read more
Published 20 months ago by M. E. Pike
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