by Zoe Duhaime
Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.
This is a dreamy, whimsical, and at times, bittersweet novel about things that are lost. Lost objects, lost childhood, loss of direction, loss of loved ones. It is also a journey to finding what was lost or maybe it is about leaving the lost behind if it needs to be. This book takes place in a city that “Is definitely not Montreal” and another “with a striking resemblance to New York“and a reminder that “all imaginary worlds lie beneath our own, just at the edge of the map“. As is typical for magical realism, the world looks and feels like the place we inhabit every day, but with a suggestion that there is an element of fantasy just beyond what we can see and feel, that the magic is there if only we knew where to look for it.
This book would appeal to Romantasy readers who enjoyed novels like The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab, Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting and Erin Morgenstern’s books like “The Night Circus”
The book centres around two protagonists – Munro and Noon – who have grown up together in the same walk up in a city not quite Montreal, with Noon on the third floor and Munro on the second. The first floor is given over to Munro’s grandmother’s book shop where Noon and Munro spend most of their time. They are inseparable as children and one evening they follow Millie to a special invite only show called “The Spectacular”. The sneak in and discover it is full of things that have been lost. Lost manuscripts, lost civilizations, lost languages, lost hairpins and umbrellas, everything curated and displayed like a museum exhibit of all things lost. The children are mesmerized. They grow older and as teenagers they lose things that are important to them; including death of family members and this pulls them apart. They refer to each other as first and lost loves but Munro moves to a city that resembles New York and becomes a curator of a museum, constantly trying to relocate the things he feels he has lost, where Noon gets stuck in her life, feeling lost and aimless, trying to let things go and not look back. Then the Spectacular returns to both their lives and they are forced to reconcile with themselves and each other. There is a push and pull to their relationship, not unlike the cycle of things lost and found and lost again.
The secondary theme to this book is literature. There are so many books out there, especially in the “Fantasy Romance” genre that wants to venerate the “bookshop”. The characters love “books”, to the point that “book” becomes a personality trait. But I feel that is more about the hobby of reading while this about the love we have had since childhood, that time when illustrations and imagination and curiosity was wrapped up in books. Books that you have carried with you from home to home to home over the years, where the spines are cracked, the pages are dog eared, the covers are missing, or holding on by a thread. This is about the trips to the library when you were small, the wonder of pulling books off the shelf because the covers looked interesting, the books read to you again and again before you could read, reading under the covers with a flashlight, the wonder of disappearing into the text. Children’s literature plays a huge role in The Lost Spectacular and many books are “title dropped” by the author. I noted some of the titles and authors that the author mentions that also played a big role in my life: Travers’ Mary Poppins, Dodie Smith, Rumer Godden, H.A. Rey, Margaret Wise Brown, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Borrowers, From the Mixed up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler, Tuck Everlasting, Babar, Arthur Ransom, The Wind in the Willows and on and on and on. Even as recent as Cordelia Funke, As someone who named their daughter after a character in a beloved children’s book and worked part time in the local children’s library as a teenager this book spoke to me on a very deep and personal level. Even Anne of Green Gables is mentioned I could see in my mind’s eye the illustrations that the author describes in the books. And the books are used as gateways and connections to travel from place to place to find lost items or borrow items that no one will miss.
Munro and Noon chase one another through these lost passages, trying to capture something or forget that which was lost. The prose flows and captivates the reader without going purple or too lyrical. The descriptions of Not quite Montreal at Christmas, the whimsy of the Spectacular, the descriptions of the books are so real I can feel the pages in my hands. There is still a satisfying romance at the core of the story and while the book may not be for everyone, for those who had a magical book filled childhood and want to relive that sense of wonder and awe you will find yourself in the pages of this book.
