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.)
Clearly, I grabbed this one for the title and the fact that it seems everyone is reading it. Seriously, I saw at least three or four copies while on vacation and it’s been popping up sporadically on book blogs since its initial release last year.
And a bonus Hanukkah novel for what was initially my final book in the 12 Books of MM Holiday Romance binge. I’m capping it at 16 because that’s how many I apparently had already downloaded to my Kindle ¯_(ツ)_/¯. I honestly wasn’t paying attention and as I read and removed I added more. Don’t get me wrong there will be more MM romances, but I need to save the hundreds of others for future years, right?
When I picked this up from the library, I had some preconceived notion that it would be more along the lines of 
Now THIS is how you end a trilogy. I assume this is the end, but I guess it could start-up again. Peaches for Father Francis picks up four years after the events of