This exuberant fantasy is finely crafted, filled with humor and very moving.
A daughter caring for her terminally ill mother must find her way out of an unusual desert town in Durst’s debut novel for adults.
Lauren Chase is resigned to a boring office job while she supports her mother, who is recovering from cancer, after abandoning her dreams of becoming an artist. When her mother relapses, Lauren hits the road to avoid hearing the prognosis. The suspense builds as she loses her wireless signal and is stranded in the aptly named town of Lost: a purgatory for lost souls, some living and some dead, who scavenge through a humorous catalog of lost items—ranging from mismatched socks to wasted water—to find the missing item they need to move on. Similar to the Nothing that destroys Fantasiana in Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Lost is surrounded by a roving dust storm that consumes anyone who dares enter it with the wrong attitude. After she's plucked from the dust by the Finder—a tattooed, supernatural being named Peter whom she develops a crush on—Lauren learns that the only way to return to the real world is to talk to a mysterious figure called the Missing Man. Unfortunately, the Missing Man takes one look at Lauren and runs away, forcing her into hiding—along with Peter and an abandoned child named Claire—with an angry mob in close pursuit. Her subsequent attempts to repel the villagers with booby traps bring levity to a grim situation. While she scavenges for clothing and food, Lauren rediscovers her forgotten interests, like her love for art and for the ocean, as she finds the courage to face her mother’s impending death. Adding to the tension is the fact that Peter doesn’t want Lauren to leave, and the longer she stays in town, the more attached she is to her new friends. Readers may be similarly torn between an appropriate ending for Lauren (returning home to deal with her mother) and the alternative (staying in Lost with Peter and Claire). Fortunately, the author will continue to explore the world of Lost in a sequel.
This exuberant fantasy is finely crafted, filled with humor and very moving.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1711-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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