5

I don’t suppose one can really like a book with so much pain, fear, disillusionment and cruelty in it. A book in which you are bound to lose almost every single character you have got attached to. A book which is annoyingly (if explicably) misogynic. A false fairy tale, no refuge from reality, where everything is turned inside out and good cannot survive unstained and villains are more to be pitied than anybody.
Doe_Jane , you knew it would hurt.
So you love me enough to have advised me with it.
Considering its idea, “The Book of Lost Things” is pretty simple. I believe it could be successfully used in college studies of adolescent psychology. There is no mystery in its events, heroes and metaphors, these depicting true-to-life unhappy endings and people who may be not what they appear and your own dark thoughts. There is hardly anything new – many times, in other stories, you entered a forest, and solved a riddle, and left a path when you had been told not to, fooled a villain and escaped, and met a friend and won a battle and… No, not a king’s crown for you this time. Just your own life to be lived, and a book to be written. Things yet to be lost and a place where to find them, in the end. Good enough?
What troubled me in the book was that there is not a positive female character, except for David’s mother and Anna, who are all angelic pure and long since dead. Terrible monsters – harpies and the Beast – are females. Loups came to the world because of females. Princesses you’ve always known to be kind, loving and beautiful are now ugly and mean. Looks like females are the most dangerous, treacherous, malicious creatures that David is possibly going to meet in his future life and he’d better keep away from them as far as possible. Even for a boy who has to put up with a stepmother (and she’s not the one to blame and really trying to be nice) this is a bit of overreacting. Besides, the most worthy and handsome Roland the knight appears to be homosexual. The fact in no way turns me against him, but cannot be ignored, either. It is actually Roland who tells the tale about the knight and the Lady, about men’s valour and daring in the battlefield and their foulness and cowardice when it comes to relationships. There can never be Adonis and the Beast, and her mind is quite resigned to that. But if someone gives her a gleam of hope, don’t expect she’ll wonderfully become a beauty or let him go and die of a broken heart. She’ll tear him and devour him, and bear her curse forever.
I had an idea that if David meets only his own fears in the fairyland, those born by his own subconsciousness, then the help that he ever gets comes from himself, too. So the Woodsman and Roland are parts of David’s own soul, all that is brave and strong and merciful in him. Both of them tell him tales, and Roland’s are more ambivalent and complicated than those of the Woodsman. So David’s attitude evolves, too, until he is ready to return to his own world and say sorry. But there’s more to them than allegories and Jungian motives, more than I can say in this suspicion of a review. It’s been quite a time since I last read a book because I believed it. Not for study purposes, not for a game, not for conscience sake – I read it like in childhood, because I really cared what happened next. Somehow, you get almost ashamed of that when you are a qualified philologist.