What happens when you take the Christian allegory out of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, modernize it and add a little queer joy and some millennial/gen-z humor—I’m not lying I legit rolled my eyes at booping death on the nose? Meg Shaffer’s The Lost Story is what happens and it was a delightful fantastical journey that I very much enjoyed.
The publisher reached out with a review copy in early 2024 and I finally got around to it just over a year later and it was worth the wait.* When I got to the passage that the publisher included in the outreach email I gasped and was like “THIS is why I requested it!” (I 100% did not re-read that email before starting this on vacation, I just knew exactly what it was and verified it afterward.)
OMFG. I can’t believe I waited as long as I did to read this. I accepted an ARC ages ago from the publisher, but then school and life got in the way and I blew past the publication date.* Then there were so many MM Holiday Romances I just had to read, and this is where we ended up me reading it in January 2024, six months after publication, and then finally getting the review posted almost a year to the date after publication (six months after I read it but back-scheduling). OH, THE SHAME.
This was by far my least favorite novel even though it was a return to the ranch with everything in the book happening there (except one scene). Only one of the protagonists was connected to the story at all, Martin, the kid of Adam Justin’s kidnappers who experienced just as much abuse and torment as they did. The other protagonist, Tyler, is a random seismologist (I think), who happened to realize there was a hole in the seismology network and convinced Nate, from book one, to let him put a detector on Crooked Tree Ranch property.
This book took a different turn from what I expected from a series set in Montana after the first book. For one thing, there were a lot fewer cowboys and horses.
I swear I’ve either read this book before or read something very similar to it. I checked the publication date and it was after I started the blog and was documenting every book. So I’m not sure why this and the second book were SO FAMILIAR. Or maybe I started it and didn’t finish it so it never made it to my list, but either way, it was really eerie reading the first two in this series.