When David slept he dreamed more often of the creature he had named the Crooked Man, who walked through forests very like the one beyond David’s window. The Crooked Man would advance to the edge of the tree line, staring out at an expanse of green lawn to where a house just like Rose’s stood. He would speak to David in his dreams.
I picked this up almost completely at random. My dad said “What else can we get Mom for Christmas?” and I said “Oh, I know. This.”, and grabbed The Book of Lost Things, which I had been eying for a while, so he got it for her, and – um, well, before she had a chance to read it I swiped it and read it myself. So that was randomish. However, A High and Hidden Place also said it was good.
Before I get started with the reviewing, I have to quote this because it slays me. I don’t usually read Amazon reviews until after I’ve written my own (then the study would be tainted), but for some reason I did in this case, and here is what someone on Amazon says about The Book of Lost Things (s/he (?) didn’t like it):
Repugnant and odious!
Don’t even THINK about allowing a child to read this – or even a teen lost in his own “goth” moment. Connolly has reached far into the earth and pulled up homosexuality, erotic thoughts, murder, gore – any evil thing possible to put a poll of black around the reader and then has the nerve to charge $16.00 for his own perversion. It’s been said that if an irishman was a boomerang he wouldn’t come home, he would just cry and whine and write stories about why he wanted to come home. This is what this melancholy, dark soul has done in this book. My advice to you is “don’t read” and my advice to Connolly is “seek help immediately” — what a distasteful, loathsome tome!
Seek help immediately. And charging $16.00 for his own perversion! The nerve! But it’s okay, because this review was referring to the hardback edition – I read the paperback, and it was free for me because I swiped it from my mother, so I got John Connolly’s Tome O’ Perversion at no cost to myself!
I enjoyed this book, although I think it would have been more cool if there had been more interaction between the fantasy world and the real world – like Pan’s Labyrinth which was very dark but very cool. As it was I ended up liking the bits in the real world better, and it was good when things overlapped somewhat, like when David could hear the books whispering and when he saw the Crooked Man in his bedroom, and like that. Once he got to the other place, there was a lot of subverting of fairy tales that sometimes seemed to be happening just for its own sake, like John Connolly’s all, Hey, what if Snow White was a bitch? What about THAT, eh? but then forgets to take it anywhere, plot-wise.
Not absolutely wildly original (but some nasty corpses, also). Not perverted. Not a tome either, either in the “one volume of several” sense or the “scholarly and ponderous” sense. But an excellent cover. Really. Excellent.