“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Atria (2006)
352 pages

Twisted fairy tales: sure, just what I was looking for. World War II background: I seem to be stumbling across a lot of books about WWII lately. A book about books: of course I want to read it. So I did.

The writing is terribly bland. It’s . . . flat. The plot was interesting, the way the myth/fairy tales were twisted were awesome, but the writing! Oh man, the writing. I’m trying to come up with another adjective, and the only one I can up with is still “flat”. I felt no connection at all with any of the characters. David did this. David did that. David is angry with his father. I don’t know. I read on because I wanted to get to the end, and also because the book came so highly recommended by so many sources. Also, it was the book not chosen by the bookclub that doesn’t exist for the month of May. (Oh man, I still need to go along and apologise for the lateness of the not-June book discussion. Which will probably be the not-June and not-July book as well. Drat.)

Anyway. The Book of Lost Things. The book is about David, a twelve-year-old boy living in England during WWII. His mother falls ill and dies, and when his father remarries and his stepmother is having a baby, David’s anger and frustration over the whole thing kinda transports him to another world, where fairy tales are twisted and he needs to find the king and the book of lost things the king has to return home. (Or something like that. Go find some other more objective summary elsewhere.)

I liked how dark the fairytale land was, and how the fairy tales were turned on their heads. My copy of the book didn’t have the appendices with the original fairy tales and explanations by Connolly and whatnot, so I am probably missing a lot of things. I don’t particularly care — I’m just glad to escape Connolly’s prose. The ending made me wince. The author seems to be intent on making sure that we know that yes, David’s changed, and yes, he will find happiness but it will be taken away from him sooner or later. Yes, we do understand that. Please be more subtle next time.

This book gave me really odd dreams. It could simply be because I was back at my parents’ house when I was reading it and sleeping in a different bed in a different room, but still, they were really weird dreams about the book. (I was reading Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game almost concurrently with this book and I didn’t dream about that book.) It wasn’t even scary — it just had the characters of the book traipsing through my dream (no David, though), all of them almost earnestly explaining why they were as they were. Unfortunately, I couldn’t recall the details of their explanations — you know how dreams are. Each dream I woke up from left me even more annoyed than I was before, and as you can see, it didn’t bode well for this commentary.

Considering that this is John Connolly’s most recommended book to date, I think I’ll have to skip the rest of his works. I traded my copy with my sister’s copy of An Abundance of Katherines when I was back at my hometown. I should ask her if she enjoyed it better than I did.