This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
To readers of her latest book, The Lost Story, author Meg Shaffer crafted a heartfelt letter that is a moving expression on the power of stories, a great way to kick off my recommendation, and a potent reminder that sometimes adults need fairy tales too.
“Dear reader,
For those of us who grew up in small and sleepy towns where nothing ever happened, books were our ticket to the universe. Narnia? King Arthur’s court? Mars? I visited them all and was home in time for dinner. For so many of us, these weren’t pleasure trips but flights to safety. People who survived rough, tough, or lonely childhoods will tell you that books were often their only friends, their only way to escape somewhere better, somewhere they knew they belonged. The Lost Story is a grown-up fairy tale about kids just like that and the compassionate open-hearted adults they become. And if you ever wanted to live inside your favorite book, The Lost Story is also for you.
Welcome home!”
As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell vanished in a West Virginia state park, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived. 15 years after their miraculous homecoming, Jeremy’s a famous missing persons investigator with an uncanny ability to find the lost, while Rafe’s a reclusive artist unable to stop creating otherworldly paintings and sculptures he shows to no one. He bears scars inside and out from his disappearance but has no memory of what happened while they were gone.
Jeremy alone knows the fantastical truth behind their time in the woods. While the rest of the world was searching for them, the two missing boys were in a magical realm filled with impossible beauty and terrible danger. However, Jeremy has kept Rafe in the dark since their return for his own mysterious reasons.
But the time for burying secrets comes to an end when Emilie Wendel hires Jeremy to find her long-lost sister . . . the sister he and Rafe knew while living in that hidden kingdom.
Check out The Lost Story at the Sioux City Public Library.
Support for Check It Out on Siouxland Public Media comes from Avery Brothers.
