During a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, I decided I wanted, for fun, for my fiancee to pick a book for me at random based solely upon the cover. Loving flowers, like she does, she naturally picked this one: The Keeper of Lost Things.
Initially, in the more grounded beginning, I was liking this book. A man who lost his wife, as well as something special she’d given him to hold onto, decides to devote his life to picking up any and every lost thing in the hopes of returning them to their owners, and maybe manifest that special thing returning to him somehow. I could’ve done without the short stories for every lost thing we encounter, but they weren’t too bothersome, and some were fine enough.
But then that man dies and things go topsy turvy, shifting into the land of silliness and the supernatural. We get more and more of the book’s other story, set in the past, and that means more and more of Portia, with her trashy plagiarized stories she tries to pass off as her own (that we, of course, must get a synopsis of every time) and her downright ugly attitude. I cared zero for Portia and the rest of her cast of characters, probably largely due to Portia casting a pall over it all. Thus, I found myself wanting to just get back to the present-day sections.
Except those too go wonky, with the aforementioned dip into the supernatural that, you know, was also into the realm of silliness. Our characters have to just sort of blindly sort things out with regards to that supernatural silliness, and it takes them way longer than I would’ve liked to sort it out. Oh, and let’s just say I groaned at the eventual reveal of the real owners of the lost things and their stories and leave it at that, because I’m trying to keep it at least somewhat vague here.
Plus, there’s Sunshine, a young woman with Down syndrome who waffles between sounding and acting like somebody with no chromosomal disorder and then almost over-doing it. Did I mention she is apparently also special in another way? She’s psychic, maybe? Cause why not? I don’t know if Hogan really knew what she wanted to do with Laura.
In short, I liked the main cast of (present-day) characters and the idea behind the story, but the ones from the past (certain characters more than others), and the resolution to many of the story’s threads left much to be desired. This is definitely a case where I can easily tell it’s a debut author we’re working with here.
