I received this book for free from Netgalley, Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
The Lost Story by Meg ShafferPublished by Random House Publishing Group on July 16, 2024
Genres: Fiction / Fantasy / Action & Adventure, Fiction / Fantasy / Romance, Fiction / Romance / LGBTQ+ / Gay
Pages: 352
Format: ARC, eBook
Source: Netgalley, Publisher
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Buy on BookshopInspired 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.
“This wildly imaginative book speaks to every reader who yearns for a more magical world.”—Thao Thai, author of Banyan Moon, a Today show Read with Jenna pick
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.
This story does manage to do a few new things with portal fantasy, which is remarkable in a genre that has such a long history and contains Narnia and Alice in Wonderland. I was able to predict several parts of the ending pretty early in the book, but there are times when knowing what is coming can be a comfort rather than a bore. This is certainly such a one.
People don’t go into portals if they’re not hurting, or looking for something, or if they don’t have a bone-deep understanding that their pieces don’t fit into the world around them. I would have jumped into a portal as a child and never looked back for an instant. Coming back isn’t something I would ever have contemplated myself.
I don’t think Jeremy and Rafe would have either except for certain circumstances, which I will leave for you to discover.
This book isn’t an action movie. To me it feels calm and quiet and sturdy, like a brick under my foot on a road to somewhere important. It is an inner journey, a spiritual one, despite the physical journey that Jeremy and Rafe and Emilie undertake in the narrative. It is solid, and good, and I read it all in one night and woke up late this morning and had to write my review before the memories faded like Rafe’s memories of the Kingdom of Shanandoah. (Note: It is spelled that way on purpose.)
Being from Ohio, it had never occurred to me that someone would be proud to be from West Virginia. Of course, I don’t feel proud to be from Ohio. It is just a statement of fact. What I do understand, quite viscerally, is Rafe’s awe and fear of his father. As the daughter of another fiercely proud Appalachian redneck, I understand completely the despair of realizing that you will never fit inside the rigid mold of paternal expectations.
If the gender binary had been a little less… binary, I think my dad and I would have gotten along. But I realized quite early on, as Rafe did, that my dad had expectations of my gender that couldn’t be swayed (don’t play in the dirt, matchbox cars aren’t for girls, you can’t have a pocketknife even if you you’d have practically been given one in the cradle if you’d only been born a boy). I knew he was intimidated and afraid of the aspects of my character that were different from and exceeded his own. I was a reader practically from birth, he had an 8th grade reading level and dropped out in 10th grade. I wasn’t supposed to want to defend myself or make my own decisions or be smarter than him. None of that stopped me from being what I was. So, Rafe, I understand. Even if I don’t understand being proud to be from West Virginia.
Maybe that’s why this book feels so solid and sturdy to me — it’s built so much like my own foundation, how could I think otherwise? I didn’t get to run away to a kingdom of unicorns and magic where I could be a knight. Not even for six months. But I would have. Oh, I would have.
