So I kinda liked and didn’t like this story. I loved the lore and I hated the second half of the book. Publishers Weekly calls Gregory Maguire’s Lost “a deftly written, compulsively readable modern-day ghost story.” Brilliantly weaving together the literary threads of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and the Jack the Ripper stories, the bestselling author of The Wicked Years canon creates a captivating fairy tale for the modern world. With Lost, Maguire–who re-imagined a darker, more dangerous Oz, and inspired the creation of the Tony Award-winning Broadway blockbuster Wicked–delivers a haunting tale of shadows and phantoms and things going bump in the night, confirming his reputation as “one of contemporary fiction’s most assured myth-makers”.

I loved the Christmas Carol. I liked the adoption story of a writer infiltrating a group of potential future adoptive parents. But afterwards the story derailed and went more into the fantastic territory.

Still read it but it was like somebody else took over the prose and changed its direction.

The castle at Bran, it turned out, was none other than the home of Vlad the Impaler–the original Count Dracula. At the sloping approach to the castle huddled a sort of Ye Olde Transylvanian Village, unpeopled and dull. Little else but chickens squawking in the dusting of snow, looking for frozen grubs or Lord knew what. The steep stairs leading up to the front door were huge stone slabs, lacking railings or balustrades. Very Hollywood, early talkies; very convincing. But once inside the castle, Wendy could catch no whiff of vampirism, could impugn no castle corridor or winding staircase with the drama of that old hackneyed tale. The place was beautifully plastered and entirely whitewashed, and if it were tricked out in tapestries of flowers and unicorns, it might serve handily as the setting of half a dozen European fairy tales.