“The Lost Story”

Meg Shaffer

Something like fifty pages in, I had to put the book down and go check the Goodreads page – I just needed to know if it was tagged ‘LGBTQ,’ because if it wasn’t, that would’ve been some She Who Must Not Be Named-level “creating chemistry between two same-sex characters and then resolutely ignoring it to cram in a straight romance,” and I just didn’t have it in me to deal with it. Fortunately, the tag was there, so I could go back to reading, and I’m so glad I did.

This… is a story about stories. The storyteller occasionally pauses the action to speak directly to the reader, and those little pauses are used to great effect. It’s taking the tropes of fairy tales and playing with them, taking the familiar shapes of those stories and asking us what else, what more, what happens in the happily ever after? And what else happened in the unhappily before? What else went on around the fairy tale, to enable the story to go the way it did? What if the story was incomplete?

And the storytelling is, again, excellent; the bulk of the plot was a touch predictable, but the characters were all so fun that I didn’t particularly mind, and that main plot ended far enough before I ran out of book that there was some fun tension in wondering what else was going to happen. The obvious Big Bad was defeated, but… what else?1 What more? Plus, some fun use of literary devices; a lot of this alludes to the Chronicles of Narnia, but I think my favorite “look at me, I remember things from English class!” moment was the realization that, halfway through the book, the flashback to one character’s pillow-talk conversation about wormholes, that had been a Chekhov’s Gun. Absolutely delightful.

Overall, my review is thus: my friend loaned me this book a while ago, and I hadn’t yet gotten to it, but was prompted to move it up the list when someone else asked to borrow her copy. “I can probably get that to you by the next time I see you,” I said, knowing it was a week and change away. I finished my current read during my lunch break on Thursday, got home, cracked open The Lost Story… and finished it Thursday night. And now, as I go to look up the Bookshop link, I’m ordering myself a copy.2 That’s how much I loved this book.

And by “obvious Big Bad” I don’t mean “obviously this Bad Guy was the Big Bad,” I mean “the identity of the Big Bad was obvious,” but again: doesn’t really detract from the story. The mystery wasn’t the key thing, it was just a touch of dramatic tension as the reader figures it out well before the characters. ↩