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.)
I had no intentions of reading this book (or the entire series) even though I’m already looking ahead to Manslaughter Park, the adaptation of 
I’ve been knitting off and on for 20+ years, but really got back into it 7-8 years ago after 2-3 years of a little bit more off-and-on. This past November I took the leap and jumped into the knitting/fiber podcasting/vlogging world and haven’t looked back.
I hadn’t really planned on buying or reading this. It’s one of those add on things, that you always wonder if it’s a cash grab or a demand of the publisher (or production company by the time this was released), versus something the author truly wanted. That being said as we were packing up to move I found a $25+ credit for one of our local book stores and wanted to use it. I went looking for something else and they didn’t have it, and it’s not an area of the city we live near anymore so I knew I wouldn’t be back so I grabbed this.
What an interesting novel. I had no idea what to expect going into this. I knew it was famous, I knew it was Brookner’s most famous novel and I knew it won the year I was born. That’s about it.