Maryam Rz.'s Reviews > Lost and Found

3.5 STARS! Brilliant, and yet lacking.

“Look, Ezekiel Blast, the past is like gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe. When bad stuff first happens, it’s like when the gum is sticking to everything—the road, the sidewalk. And you can’t wear that shoe into the house because it will get all involved in the carpet and the bathroom rug, but when you try to scrape it off on the edge of the sidewalk or the edge of the porch, or you try to rub it off in the grass, it won’t come off. So you have to just live with it. You walk along, your foot trying to stick with every step, but gradually as the gum gets dirtier and dries out more and more, it loses its stickiness. And eventually, without ever actually removing it, you forget the gum is there. Except maybe on a hot day the gum gets soft and a little sticky again, and you think, Oh, yeah, gum on my shoe.”

You know, I've always wondered—we say my eyes stung or burst or burned, and all that is good and true, but to me it feels more like being stung by a vicious bug and starting to swell up and then generally failing to be of any use.

And reading this book, my eyes were stung by a vicious bug and started swelling up and generally failed to be of any use.

Lost and Found could've easily been a five-star read; it had everything: clever, weird, and creative observations and ideas; amazing, thrilling plot, unforgettable characters; unique magic-micropower-whatever-you-wanna-call-it; and much witty, hilarious dialogue.

The only problem (which is also kind of a big one) is that the whole book was an endless string of dialogue, sprinkled with occasional endless streams of thought. There were no descriptions of anything. At all. Places? Barely. People? What. Expressions? Haha. Tones? Don't even think about it. Feelings? What are they even. The fact that the characters had actually left the house and were walking to other houses? Duh. Even plays include a note on tone or movements of the characters. It felt like only reading the subtitles of a spectacular film, if the subtitles also included conversations in our heads as well as on our lips.

Yes, those were all awesome, fantastic, perfetto, but they weren't enough. Seriously, this is Orson Card! Sure, I haven't read anything else by him yet but, I mean, it's Orson Card. Truth, I can see why Orson Card is Orson Card, the genius in this book is testament enough. And truth, this was an ARC. But. I can't believe they gave out ARCs at such an early stage and that the finished copy would actually have the missing 100-150 pages of...well...everything.

All that aside, I truly enjoyed this book. Hell, I even loved it. And no, I didn't mind that most all the characters sounded the same smart-snotty, because it was such an entertaining, brilliant, creative smart-snotty that I couldn't help but crave more despite it being quite unrealistic.

I loved it, and it drove me utterly insane.

“It’s driving me crazy.”
“We’re all just a quick bike ride from crazy, Ezekiel,”said Dad. “It almost never requires any driving.”
“Dad, I carry crazy in my pocket all the time and keep taking it out to look at it...makes me wonder if it’s sanity I keep in my pocket and it only looks like crazy because I’m already bonkers.”
“As good a description of human life as I’ve ever heard,” said Father.

I received an ARC through NetGalley for an honest review. Many thanks to Blackstone Publishing!