THE LOST STORY - Meg Shaffer

5 stars

A new favorite book!! Like a continued conversation of C.S. Lewis' Narnia but with some much-needed modern updates and encapsulating the most important bit: the joy of portal fantasy.

Concept: ★★★★
Pacing: ★★★★★
Characters: ★★★★
Plot: ★★★★

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.

Sometimes, there are stories that come out of nowhere and knock you back on your feet in pure joy. The Lost Story was one of those tales for me.

I went into this novel with little to no expectations—it was my Book of the Month book club pick, and seemed like the best of the lot in a lackluster selection pool. So it was to my pleasant surprise that I found myself captivated by this fairytale of childhood escapades colliding with adult dreams.

If you were a Narnia kid, you've got to give this novel a try. (And, if you weren't a Narnia person for the religious reasons, rest assured that this story is a safe space for you too as religion is not a factor in this remake.)

The Lost Story is about two adult men coming together again after decades of separation and separate grief periods following a mysterious lost period of their childhood. It's also about an adult woman looking for her long-lost sister, who she never knew but has always mourned. And it's about "finding" in all of its forms. Finding your way, finding love, finding home, finding what was once lost.

Like all the best fairytales, this story isn't that deep yet hits all of the deep notes. We're not excavating Christianity like C.S. Lewis, and we're not trying to take any moral stance on anything. But we are coming to the meaning of love, and acceptance, and overcoming childhood traumas to discover inner peace.

I think it's best to go into this novel with little more than that as preparation—part of the magic is in the joy of experiencing this story for what it is.

However, please note there are some trigger warnings: childhood abuse, parental abuse of father to child (not sexual), trauma from those experiences affecting the child as an adult, confronting your abuser, homophobia.