Have you ever lost something? Well it could have ended up in The Keeper of Lost Things’ house!
Lost Things – the blurb
Once a celebrated author of short stories now in his twilight years, Anthony Peardew has spent half his life collecting lost objects, trying to atone for a promise broken many years before.
Realising he is running out of time, he leaves his house and all its lost treasures to his assistant Laura, the one person he can trust to fulfill his legacy and reunite the thousands of objects with their rightful owners.
But the final wishes of the ‘Keeper of Lost Things’ have unforeseen repercussions which trigger a most serendipitous series of encounters…
A bit of this a bit of that
The Keeper of Lost Things is my book club’s latest book and not one I would have necessarily have picked myself. When I first started reading I wasn’t sure what to expect – was it magical and ghostly? Romcom? Highbrow fiction? Well it turns out it was a little bit of everything. Hogan has described the style as UpLit being uplifting to the reader. It certainly had charm and a suitably happy ending but that came with an inevitable predictableness. It reminded me to some extent of The Girl Who Reads on the Metro the book with the blurb that describes me to a T. I didn’t love Metro but would I love Lost Things?
Well I really enjoyed the short stories that accompanied the missing items. Initially I thought these were the stories Peardew had published but turns out I was wrong on that. I thought Sunshine was slightly overplayed and the phrase ‘lovely cup of tea’ was repeated so many times it made my jaw hurt from clenching every time I read it. I loved Bomber and preferred his parts of the book although had issues with how it finished for him which I won’t go into for plot spoilers. It also felt at times as though the thesaurus had been over used with ‘spinning liquorice discs rewarding melliflous tones’ feeling out of place amongst starcrossed lovers and doughnut eating dogs.
The above sounds really critical so apologies, don’t let me put you off. It’s lighthearted with a serious dose of serendipity and if you are looking for heartwarming characters and a reworking of Harry Potter that you will never expect then it will be just your cup of tea.