Search - Lost

Like most of Mr Maguire's books, LOST suffers from overly flowery prose, a frenetic and rather unlikeable heroine, and hap-hazard skips through narratives. If the house Winnie is staying in is indeed haunted, it's certainly the most benign, boring haunting in literary history. There are a few interesting moments, but for the most part you're left amazed when you look up and realise how many pages you've turned without anything actually happening. Maguire is a niche writer with unique ideas that unfortunately fall flat when he puts pen to paper. 2.5 stars out of 5.

I truly felt lost while reading Lost by Gregory Maguire. This is the second book I've read by this author so I can say that I really don't care for his style of writing. Unfortunately, I have all his other books to read. Critics call his prose "rich" and maybe it is that but I find it confusing to point of sheer frustration sometimes.

There is a thoroughly unlikeable (to me anyway) "heroine" named Winifred Rudge. She writes children's books but would like to write one for adults with a heroine named Wendy Pritzke. She's become blocked and unable to write. She thinks if she goes to the old family homestead in Hampstead, Great Britain she'll be able to get a jump start. The family originally owned the whole house but it's since been turned into "flats" and sold off to other people. Only Winnie's cousin John still owns the top floor flat and she plans to stay with him.

This is good so far, I can understand it. The first mystery comes right in the beginning of the book when she attends a meeting for parents who want to adopt internationally. She says she is writing a book about that topic but later we learn she is lying. So why was she there? I like little mysteries like that. What I didn't like was the conversations between Winnie and the other characters. I felt like I was trying to follow a maze and that feeling continued throughout the book with her interactions with all the other characters.

When she arrives in England, she finds another mystery: her cousin has disappeared. Where did he go? Was he kidnapped, murdered? Is he in hiding? And what is that knocking noise behind the wall? There are repairmen there to do renovations in the flat but they are afraid of the knocking. Winnie takes it upon herself to go visiting all the neighbors to see if she can figure out if it's a ghost, a trapped cat or just what.

At first Winnie's behavior seems okay if a little odd. As she is running around offending the neighbors and trying to find her cousin or the ghost or the cat or whatever, she is imagining scenes in her mind from her adult book. Some of the questions begin to be answered about what is really going on. As they're answered, she's becoming weirder and weirder.

I was so ready for the book to end. I'm not even sure what really happened to Winnie during those last couple of chapters.

Reviewers say that the book is about loss and being lost. Yes, it is definitely that. If you like Gregory Maguire and you haven't read the book, go for it. Otherwise, it's not on my recommend-to-friends list.

I was a little lost (no pun intended) while reading this book. He seemed to jump around a lot, but maybe it was only me. In the end, I still enjoyed the story.

Kind of hard to summarize the theme without giving away the plot. I would have given this a higher rating, but it seems like it started out one way and then near the end veered off in a completely different direction, even though that's not really the case in hindsight. Often that sort of ending can be satisfying, as the loose ends tie up and you go "aha!". I didn't find that the case with this story though. It left me feeling tricked instead, like I was purposely misled, and not in a good way. Also, are people in England really this blunt with each other?

Not one of Maguire's best...

A virtual literary paella of adult and children's fantasies: Jack the Ripper, A Christmas Carol, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Exorcist even a wafting glimpse of Dracula. The result is a deftly written, compulsively readable modern-day ghost story that easily elicits suspension of disbelief. American writer Winifred Rudge, whose mass market book about astrology has been far more successful than her fiction, is in London to research a novel linking Jack the Ripper to the house in Hampstead where her own great-great-grandfather rumored to be the model for Ebenezer Scrooge lived. But as Winifred discovers, there is no evidence that the Ripper ever visited Hampstead, let alone buried one of his victims inside the chimney of a house there, and his presence in the story is a red herring. Much more interesting is the mysterious disappearance of Winnie's cousin, John Comestor, the latest resident of the family house. Moreover, something is making an infernal racket inside the chimney, and soon there are other bizarre manifestations of some unseen force. A Dickensian assortment of neighbors (one dotty lady is called Mrs. Maddingly) variously obfuscate and hint at strange events. Maguire's prose is both jaunty and scary; he knows how to mix spooky ingredients with contemporary situations. By the time a spirit called Gervasa begins to speak through Winnie, readers will be hooked.

If you like tales of woe, legends and ghosts...this book is for you! This is a great and quick read! Wonderful reading for a cold spring night!!!!

This book was a BIG disappointment. There was absolutly no likable characters at all. Could not get into this book at all and found it horrably hard to finish. Bluh!!!

I found this book to be on par with the other Gregory Maguire's I've read so far, with the exception of Wicked. It takes WAY too long to get to the payoff of the story and when you get there you wonder why that part isn't as long as the rest of the book. Overall, I liked the gist of the story, but I can't say it was my favorite book.

After reading "Wicked" and "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister", I was disappointed with this novel. I found it somewhat confusing, and had expected a definite fairy tale connection which was never found. If it was a different kind of novel than "Wicked" or "Confessions..." that's fine, but I wish they hadn't put "Author of Wicked and Confessions..." on the front cover then, as I then expected this story to be 'the other side' of a fairy tale as those were. Yes, there are connections to Jack the Ripper and Scrooge, but not what you would think. I'm glad that some people found this book enjoyable, or at least wrote reviews that they did. I don't think I would read it again...

This book was okay. Not as good as Wicked.

Not as good as some of Maguire's other books, but still interesting.

One of the better Gregory Maguire books, the dialogue is much less confusing than his other books.

i liked this a bit more than wicked. much more modern, easier to follow.

This is a good book. I have enjoyed all of this author's books and this one puts a spin on several old classics like A Christmas Carol and then adds a little Jack the Ripper. I have read it several times and get a different impression of it everytime. I may want to swap back for it some day because it is a good story, but for now I want to spread the love!

Don't expect Wicked because this isn't anywhere near the same- you can eventually get drawn in to it but, overall, it's a very disjointed story within a story that jars at the reader.

Nice ghost story/mystery.