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Lost: A Novel by Gregory Maguire
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Lost: A Novel (edition 2002)

by Gregory Maguire

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3,177504,171 (2.81)89
"A brilliant, perceptive, and deeply moving fable." --Boston Sunday Globe   Publishers Weekly calls Gregory Maguire's Lost "a deftly written, compulsively readable modern-day ghost story." Brilliantly weaving together the literary threads of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and the Jack the Ripper stories, the bestselling author of The Wicked Years canon creates a captivating fairy tale for the modern world. With Lost, Maguire--who re-imagined a darker, more dangerous Oz, and inspired the creation of the Tony Award-winning Broadway blockbuster Wicked--delivers a haunting tale of shadows and phantoms and things going bump in the night, confirming his reputation as "one of contemporary fiction's most assured myth-makers" (Kirkus Reviews).… (more)
Member:pricolici
Title:Lost: A Novel
Authors:Gregory Maguire
Info:Harper Paperbacks (2002), Paperback, 352 pages
Collections:Your library
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Work Information

Lost by Gregory Maguire

  1. 00
    Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol by Tom Mula (WildMaggie)
    WildMaggie: Alternative views of Dicken's classic tale.
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» See also 89 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 50 (next | show all)
A very psychological tail.Creepy here and there with the intentional flavor of a Victorian ghost story. I felt the tie-ins to Scrooge worked well, but that the Peter Pan and Alice in wonderland ones felt somewhat forced. ( )
  cspiwak | Mar 6, 2024 |
I did not enjoy this. There was too much going on and none of it was very interesting. ( )
  afrozenbookparadise | Apr 22, 2021 |
I LOVED THIS BOOK!! I was enthralled immediately, and could not wait to get back to it, for more! the ending was a little glossed over, though.. and felt unfinished. The haunting was never completely explained, and I wished for more. There were too many characters in the beginning, with a few brought back at the end (and so much has happened, you may forget who they are.) The lead character was an odd duck, but through her transformations, we hope she became a "full" person, complete with a joyous will to live. I loved it, none-the-less!! ( )
  stephanie_M | Apr 30, 2020 |
This book was a chore to read, and I only finished it because I had brought it on vacation and had no other options. Used to being completely overwhelmed with the deep magic and inimitable creativity, humor, and darkness of Gregory Maguire, this book was a dead fish of a read. I think this would have been a great short story, but it just drags at novel length. ( )
  Samberry | Aug 3, 2019 |
The perpetual theme of this book is spelt out from the first to the last page. And at times I became lost in the plot; not because Winnie moves into the story she is writing, which in fact works well, but because the structure of the story, particularly towards the end, is weak.

In spite of my disappointment, both in the denouement and in the inconclusive finale, I found this book enjoyable to read because of the variety in writing style, the literary references and the clever use of vocabulary. There are so many carefully chosen words which Maguire uses effectively to explain the setting. When the Forever Families meeting first assembles he describes how “ Winnie and the other supplicants hung back”. He moves from sloppy American everyday language to describe the accident on the freeway to purple prose to build up the tension such as “Throughout the night, the house shuddered, the furnace gasping emphysematously(!), the windows bucking in their casings”. I also appreciate his acerbic wit in comments like “the pursuit of Happy meals”.

There seem to be two parallel threads running through the book; the loss of a child even referred to in metaphors such as “The window shattered spraying glassy baby teeth”, and the suspension and intermingling of time. The phrase “Time no longer” kept occurring to me and I finally identified it as coming from “Tom’s Midnight Garden” by Philippa Pearce where two lonely children from different eras meet during troubled dreams at the time when the clock strikes 13. As an aficionado of children’s fiction, I wonder if Maguire was consciously or unconsciously using this plot as yet another form of inspiration for his book. I found the references to classic children’s books an interesting facet of the story, but it does presuppose that the reader is almost as familiar as he is with the other stories.

I did wonder early in the book whether Winnie was actually dead, as the haunting seemed to follow her, but gradually the suspense and fear created by Maguire was replaced by so much psychology about Winnie’s feelings of guilt and despair. Had I been the publisher of the book I would have returned it to Maguire so that he could tighten up the story structure and improved his characterisation to match his skill with language.

Obviously names are carefully chosen to match the characters, but I found this irritating. It is as if he doesn’t trust the reader to decide on a character’s motivation and purpose in the book. I kept wishing that Winifred Rudge had a flowing romantic name like Winona Ryder. Then perhaps she might have been a more sympathetic character.

So, an unusual book which was worth reading, but somehow it fails to achieve- whatever it was trying to do? I do, however want to read “Wicked” and “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister” since they sound much more my cup of tea.
( )
  Somerville66 | May 29, 2017 |
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Gregory Maguireprimary authorall editionscalculated
Smith, DouglasIllustratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to little new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, for both our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvelously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so neatly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly our of awareness into a fantasm-invested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain. - Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
Dedication
For Maggie and Dan Terris, with love
First words
"Somebody else in the vehicle," said the attorney-type into his cell phone.
Quotations
"Kenneth Grahame wrote about the idylls of choldhoo in Dream Days and The Wind in the Willows, and his son Alistair's death on a railroad track was probably a suicide. One of the original Lost Boys for who James Barrie had invented Peter Pan had also killed himself. Christopher Milne the Christopher Robin of his father's tales, whinged in print up until his death. The curse of childhood fancy." (?)

"But now? Now? Children in the twentieth and this early twenty first century hated the Alice books, couldn't read them, and why should they? Their world had strayed into madness long ago. Look at the planet. Rain is acid, poisonous. Sun causes cancer. Sex=death. Children murder each other. Parents lie, teachers lie, the churches have less moral credibility than Benneton ads. And faces of missing children staring out from the milk cartons-imagine all those poor Lost Boys, and Lost Girls, not in Neverland but lost here, lost now. No wonder Wonderland isn't funny to read anymore, We live there full-time. We need a break from it." (58)

"Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd go away." (?)

"When in danger, when in doubt,
Run in circles, scream and shot." (?)

"But the wanting, she thought, the wantin was an active thing, not a numbness. It was the world that was numb with cold and snow, not hte singer. The singer was fiercely alive in a dead environment." (?)

"Appearing to be talking to yourself clears the way, she observed. And yelling does it more efficiently still." (303)

"Now this is this, or seems to be. When you are haunted by any variety of effective nonsense, like love or guilt or poetry or memory, which are anyway at their bitter root the same thing - the primary symptom is paralysis. You just can't move. Then, all too rarely, the virus is vanquished , the contagion concluded, the spell is broken, the cold front snaps in prismatic splinters. Bright moment, that, and bight moment, next, and so on and so forth. What returns is a sense of presense tense as being not only availiable, but valid." (?)
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Wikipedia in English (1)

"A brilliant, perceptive, and deeply moving fable." --Boston Sunday Globe   Publishers Weekly calls Gregory Maguire's Lost "a deftly written, compulsively readable modern-day ghost story." Brilliantly weaving together the literary threads of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and the Jack the Ripper stories, the bestselling author of The Wicked Years canon creates a captivating fairy tale for the modern world. With Lost, Maguire--who re-imagined a darker, more dangerous Oz, and inspired the creation of the Tony Award-winning Broadway blockbuster Wicked--delivers a haunting tale of shadows and phantoms and things going bump in the night, confirming his reputation as "one of contemporary fiction's most assured myth-makers" (Kirkus Reviews).

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