by John Connolly. Atria, 2006. 339 pp.

March 19, 2007

The children in classic fairy tales often find themselves alone and in danger. Their survival depends on their ability to discern the true nature of the characters they encounter and also, of course, on their ability to cleverly defeat their enemies. In The Book of Lost Things, 12-year-old David finds himself in a situation similar to the children in the fairy tales he loves. His world is in turmoil: his mother has recently died after a long illness; his father has remarried and started a new family; and they have moved into the country to escape the German bombs. What’s more, the books in David’s attic room have started talking to him, and he is also experiencing strange attacks in which he dreams of wolves and kings. When David hears his mother’s voice calling him, he follows the call into the sunken garden and from there into the world of fairy tales.

With skill and inventiveness, Connolly re-imagines the familiar world of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, adding new twists to the ancient stories of Hansel and Gretel, Childe Roland, and Sleeping Beauty. A few of the new ideas are funny, especially the chapter on Snow White and the dwarfs (you may never be able to think of that princess the same way again). More often, Connolly manages to make the fantasy world darker and more frightening than ever before, while still upholding the moral principle that goodness and bravery will be rewarded in the end.

Make no mistake about it, however: this is not a book for children. (Some would argue that the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales isn’t either, and indeed those stories are much more gruesome than the Disney version kids are familiar with today.) The Loups, half wolf and half human, keep the reader on edge with their vicious unpredictability. Furthermore, the novel’s true villain--The Crooked Man--is an evil trickster who steals children from their safe worlds to experiment on them and eat their hearts in order to maintain his unnaturally long life. Reading this, the readers shiver at the echoes of the evil in our own world, where unspeakable things can happen to the innocent.

Connolly has written several crime novels, and his attention to psychological realism even as he portrays mystical events is what makes this novel more than a gimmick. David is the classic outsider before he enters the world of magic. His grief at his mother’s death and his burning resentment at the baby brother who threatens to take his place within the family are written with heartbreaking accuracy of detail. Like many fairy tales and legends, this is the story of a quest--the quest from adolescence into adulthood, from hatred into forgiveness, from grief into acceptance.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is that David’s experiences may not be “real,” which is asserted by the adults in the book; David’s attacks may be caused by a mental breakdown after the disruption in his life, and at the end of the book, the adults tell him that he was in a coma after a German plane crashed in the garden. David knows about the plane (he saw it crash that night), but the narrator insists that there were certain things that could not be explained about David’s disappearance, and there the matter rests, in favor of the supernatural occurrences. It is the Woodsman and Roland, two men with true nobility of spirit, who teach David what he needs to know to survive, not the clueless psychiatrist Dr. Moberly. In this, the book affirms one of its epigraphs, by Friedrich Schiller: “Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.”

Connolly never sugar-coats the fact that life, like the stories, can bring grief and pain. Learning to reject the darker side of one’s nature in favor of love and courage, however, allows us a way through the tangles in which we find ourselves. At the end of David’s life, we are relieved to know that “all that was lost is found again.” In a novel with a profound moral center, that’s the happy ending we’ve been longing for.

© 2007, Alison Andrews

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