When in danger, when in doubt,
Run in circles, scream and shout.

Lost is a book by the author of Wicked. Maguire cleverly combines fairytales, history and an agile imagination to create stories that are impossible not to keep thinking about, long after the book is finished. Lost uses the story of Ebeneezer Scrooge as its pillar, to tell the story of Winnie Rudge, a writer who has traveled to London to research her next novel. She arrives to find the relative she planned to stay with missing, his flat occupied by builders and a very creepy haunting. Maguire's talent is in how he combines all the disparate elements of his story into a seamless tale. ( )

Gregory Maguire has made his name by his sophisticated retelling of childhood classics: Wicked dealt was about the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, while Confessions was the Cinderella story – from the point of view of the ugly stepsister.



Lost purports to deal with Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, with diversions into Jack the Ripper territory, also featuring a book within a book as heroine Winifred Rudge mentally maps her next novel while at the same time trying to solve to disappearance of her step-cousin.



Family history, ghosts, missing cats, and Ebenezer Scrooge, the book starts slowly and I battled to get into it. Ultimately, the effort – like the opportunity Maguire had to create an entertaining story – was wasted. ( )

This was the most boring book that I have read all year and it was torture trying to get through it. ( )

I have read Wicked and Son of a Witch, both great works by Gregory Maguire, Lost was not that at all. It was slow and boring. I was disappointed. In hopes of another well written tragic story, I received whiny and melodramatic- the main character is annoying.
The story attempted to have the main character search out the background of Jack the Ripper, and there really wasn't any of that. ( )

(This review stems from listening to the Audio CDs.)

This is the most BORING piece of writing I've picked up this year - and I've taken accounting, statistics and anthropology.
Winnie, the main character, is annoying. I read her as a dumpy, dissatisfied middle-aged frump who is sarcastic (but never witty) and quite unbearable to be around. (Seriously, by the end of the third disk I was quite sure her cousin John was missing because he knew she was coming and couldn't stand the thought of dealing with her visit.) The 'quirky' characters fall flat and uninteresting, and the plot doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I'm listening to the audio book, and I've made it to the beginning of the 6th disk, so I'm a little over halfway through, and I just can't stand it anymore. The Dickens references aren't so bad, nor Jack the Ripper (but he is so overdone) or the dozens of mentions of Peter Pan. With a different narrator, these plot elements could have tied together quite nicely into an interesting story. But Winnie, who seems to be a Mary-Sue stand-in for Gregory Maguire to describe his process as a writer, is such an irritant that I can't wait to find a different book to listen to on my commute.

(Aside: Reading other reviews, it seems the story suddenly changes style and takes the plot in a completely different direction; unfortunately, I couldn't slog deep enough into the book to get there.) ( )