The Book of Lost Things

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There are many fairytales out there and many of them include lovely princesses with fancy dresses and beautiful hair.

We are introduced to this strong and tall knight in shining armour, who takes the main character under his wing for a while. After a time we get to know him a little better and find out that he is looking for someone, another knight, whose picture he keeps hidden in a locket around his neck.Immediately after arriving, David runs into the Woodsman (The Red-riding hood one) who rescues him from certain death at the hands of a group of half-human, half-wolf mutants. The Loups attack the castle, and the Crooked Man promises to save David if he speaks his brother’s name. Sometimes it felt like I was reading a book from the Victorian era and there are a lot of fairytale retellings in these pages. As David continues towards the king’s castle, he meets several other characters, such as a feisty group of dwarves, their gluttonous roommate, Snow White, and a sick-minded huntress who fuses the heads of children to the bodies of animals.

That all generally works beautifully here, except that it's oh-so-very dark and misanthropic a tale that I'd reserve it for grown boys who used to be good and are having trouble figuring the path ahead. But they must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. We face those that we have to face, and there will be time when we must make the choice to act for a greater good, even at risk to ourselves, but we do not lay down our lives needlessly.

Eventually David finds himself in another world where dark, grim versions of classic fairy tale characters exist but are nothing like the way they are normally portrayed. He then stares down Jonathon, the Crooked Man, and the vicious wolf monsters, who until that point only appeared in the story when Connolly felt the need to remind us that David was in danger because wolf monsters were chasing him; they never catch up to him except at the end and, as I said, David simply stares them down and wins by virtue of his newfound manhood. In fact, after the sixth chapter, neither of those characters appears again until the (two chapters long! As the story progresses, he meets different people and occasionally they will tell him stories that echo fairy tales he has read.