Book Review: "The Lost Story"
This delightful fantasy book--set in my home state of West Virginia--is a cozy, poignant, and heartwarmingly queer take on C.S. Lewis-style fairy tales.
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Warning: Spoilers for the book follow.
As soon as I saw the jacket blurb for The Lost Story, I knew I was going to have to read it. The story focuses on Rafe (real name Ralph) and Jeremy, two young men who went missing in a West Virginia state forest (the fictional Red Crow) as teenagers, only to emerge six months later. Fast forward several years and they’ve drifted apart, but they’re brought together by Emilie, who employs Jeremy–who seems to be blessed with the ability to find any missing person–to find her sister, who has already been missing for several years. They find their way into the magical kingdom that Jeremy and Rafe visited years earlier, where they connect with Emilie’s sister, now named Skya and who rules as queen, and go on various adventures and come to terms with both their lives in this strange new world and in the one that they left behind.
A story about two queer boys? And it's set at least in part in West Virginia? With gay longing and magic and a fantasy kingdom? And it’s also a second-chance romance? I mean, if you were to manufacture a story just for me in a lab, then I daresay that you’d get something very similar to The Lost Story. It’s as if the author looked into my mind, saw the things that are catnip for me, and put them all on the page.
In case you haven’t noticed by the way that I’ve been going on, this book was deeply personal to me. When I was a teenager in West By God Virginia, my best friend–with whom I was hopelessly and desperately in love–would go on walks in the forest and pretend to be a knight and a wizard. You know, the usual nerdy stuff that teenage boys do that’s also vaguely gay (or so I wished). I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this book is a kind of wish-fulfillment for me, allowing me to have a brief feeling of what it would have been like to find true love with my own sweet, troubled best friend from high school…actually, I would very much say that. I’m not ashamed to admit that I often have a deeply personal relationship with the books I read, and this one is no exception. The Lost Road is wish-fulfilment, pure and simple.
This isn’t to say that it’s not a great story on its own merits, because it absolutely is. As the plot summary makes clear, it owes more than a little to C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia. Unlike, say, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, however, The Lost Story doesn’t set out so much to critique Lewis so much as to open up the sort of stories he wrote to those who were usually excluded. This is the kind of book that’s written for every little gay boy who’s ever had a crush on their friend and wanted to go to a magic kingdom where they could both be together.
There’s a sweetness to The Lost Story that draws you in immediately, and it’s one of those books that really does want you to love and care about these characters, in all of their complexity. What’s more, it really does capture the angst and uncertainty of being a gay kid in West Virginia (even though its protagonists came of age in the 2000s, that period had a lot in common with the preceding decade). In one of the few chapters that we get from Jeremy’s point of view, he recalls the night that they spent together in a hotel, neither of them willing to go to sleep, both wishing something might happen. “It didn’t,” he remembers, “because no one on earth was more chickenshit than a boy in love with another boy who doesn’t know he’s in love with him.”
Oof. That one hit hard, friends. Anyone who has ever pined for a love that they think can never be will know this feeling all too well.
And, like the very best fairy tales, this one also addresses some pretty dark stuff. Among other things, Rafe has to contend with the fact that his father was abusive and destructive, leaving scars both physical and emotional that he spends much of the book trying to heal. Jeremy, too, has his own burdens, particularly as these revolve around grief and the fact that, as a result of magic, Rafe cannot recall the fact that they consummated their love within the magical realm. Through it all, though–through all of the heartbreak and the grief and the trauma, the battles with the sinister beings known as the Bright Boys–they manage to find strength and love with one another. And, I’m happy to say, they get their own happy ending, even if it’s one that involves no small amount of sacrifice. After all, even a happy-ever-after comes with a price.
Though I found myself mostly drawn to Jeremy and Rafe (for obvious reasons) I also found Emilie to be a plucky and badass heroine in her own right. Like every good heroine, she has her own fair share of struggles and burdens. Like Rafe, she’s had a less than stellar family life–her birth mother put her up for adoption, and though she was happy with her adopted mother, she sadly died before the novel begins–and she has had to contend with the grief of never knowing what happened to her sister. Despite all of this, she still manages to keep going, and she’s as willing to fight for her new friends as she is for the sibling that she discovers in this brave new world.
I’ve noticed that some reviewers didn’t like the fact that a good chunk of the book is spent with the characters in our world, but for me I actually quite enjoyed these parts even more than the fantasy realm. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the fantasy world that Skya rules, in no small part because it’s where Jeremy and Rafe finally get to reconnect as lovers and not just friends. However, the early parts of the book allow us to get to know the characters and their milieu, and this grants their eventual reunions even more power and poignancy.
The Lost Story belongs to the category of cozy fantasy that’s quite the rage right now. I love epic fantasy, obviously, and I think that my heart and soul will always be in that particular sub-genre. However, I recognize that there’s a lot to be gained from reading stories like this, one in which the stakes don’t feel quite as life-and-death as we’re used to in epic fare. Don’t get me wrong: there are stakes in this book, but they tend to be more of the personal and emotional kind rather than the cosmological. This is, after all, a fairy tale, and so its scale tends to be smaller and more intimate, and that’s precisely why I loved it so much.
Ultimately, The Lost Story is for all of those who yearn for a magical world where we can be ourselves, where we can escape the burdens of our trauma filled pasts and where our longings can be fulfilled, where we can be the very best and happiest versions of ourselves. There’s heartbreak in this book, and it remains unclear right up until the end whether Jeremy and Rafe will ever be able to return to the place where they found such happiness. One thing’s for sure, though: they’ll do it together. After all, there’s nothing that queer love cannot do.