Lost Thing Research Articles

Языковая игра как способ стилизации детской речи (на примере романов “Room” Э. Донохью, “All the Lost Things” М. Сакс и “Florence and Giles” Дж. Хардинга)

This article is devoted to the speech of child narrators in novels written for an adult audience. Several studies that consider the speech of child characters note that it is stylized as a child’s with the help of various linguistic means. These include a language game. The article analyzes the use of this technique as a way of stylizing the speech of a child narrator through the example of modern English-language novels Room (Emma Donoghue, 2010), All the Lost Things (Michelle Sacks, 2019), and Florence and Giles (John Harding, 2010). These novels have been chosen because all of them have child narrators, aged 5, 7 and 12 respectively. The analysis shows that a language game can be used both as the main means of stylizing a child’s speech (Florence and Giles) and as a minor one, along with others (Room, All the Lost Things). In the novel Room, the language game manifests itself in the use of conversion, word formation with the help of the suffix -ness, word composition. In All the Lost Things, the language game is mainly represented by word composition. In the novel Florence and Giles, an intentional language game serves as the main means of stylizing a child’s speech. The narrator’s speech is full of occasional expressions formed with the help of conversion, prefixation, suffixation and word composition, reinterpretation of set expressions. An analysis of ontolinguistic studies shows that language game is present in the speech of children. It can be either unintentional, which is associated with situations of cognitive and language deficit, or intentional, which is due to the child’s desire to express themselves in speech. The correlation between the found examples of language game and the real characteristics of children’s speech allows for the conclusion that the depiction of language game is a plausible way of stylizing children’s speech.

The Promise of Lost Things by Helene Dunbar

Reviewed by: The Promise of Lost Things by Helene Dunbar Amanda Toledo Dunbar, Helene The Promise of Lost Things. Sourcebooks Fire, 2022 [320p] Paper ed. ISBN 9781492667407 $10.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781492667414 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 9-12 Ghosts aren't fiction in St. Hilaire, New York, a small enclave where those with powers to commune with the dead live according to rules established by a corrupt Guild. Russ, a teen eager to prove himself as student leader of the Guild's Youth Corps, mixes addictive herbs from his grandmother's garden to enhance his powers and is helped further by the ghost of powerful teen medium Ian Mackenzie, who is no less charming for being dead. Outside the town gates, seventeen-year-old Asher wants to mourn his sister in peace, but his parents, hosts of the reality TV show Ghost Killers, want to film a special episode proving the mystics of St. Hilaire are [End Page 319] frauds. Asher befriends Russ to help his parents but finds he doesn't want to take down the town of the boy he's slowly growing attached to. Meanwhile, Willow, the delightfully wicked medium training Russ, has plans to bring prominence and power to herself and the town, and she's not letting anyone get in her way. The three narrators bring a lot of moving pieces to this plot, but the story unspools with intriguing suspense and satisfyingly resolves leftover mysteries from the first novel in the series, Prelude for Lost Souls. In a book dealing with the ethereal, Dunbar's writing is grounded in richly detailed descriptions of physical sensations and emotions, and those qualities shine in a brief but exhilarating kiss Russ and Asher share. Fantastic elements layered in with poignant, human moments of grief make this ghost story a solid sequel. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Графический способ стилизации детской речи и моделирования детского мировосприятия в художественных произведениях (на примере романов “Room” Э. Донохьюи “All the Lost Things” М. Сакс)

The article discusses graphic techniques used in the speech of a child narrator in works of fiction intended for an adult audience. Imitation of a child narration in such works is a challenge for the author since the speech of a child character cannot fully correspond to the speech of a real child. Therefore, the child narrative in adult literature appears to be highly artificial and is perceived by the reader as a device. The analysis of scientific papers devoted to the speech of child characters shows that their speech is stylized as a child’s. Stylization implies that authors use a certain set of linguistic elements that correlate to the real characteristics of children’s speech, but at the same time can be artistically enhanced. Authors can stylize children’s speech at different language levels. The graphic way of stylizing children’s speech and modeling a child’s worldview is rarely distinguished and is called unconventional by some researchers. It can be used for expressing the intonation, marking new words and phenomena, communicating someone else’s words, etc. The article analyzes modern works in English where the narrators are children aged 5 and 7: Room (by Emma Donoghue, 2010) and All the Lost Things (by Michelle Sacks, 2019). In the chosen novels, the graphic way of stylizing children’s speech and thinking is used both as an independent and as an additional method. Independently, the graphic technique is used to mark words and phrases that are new, incomprehensible, difficult for the characters, words in another language, as well as someone else’s words in their speech. As an additional method, it is used to enhance other techniques and linguistic units that imitate children’s speech: personifications, onomatopoeic interjections, hyperbole.

Beyond “Populism”: The Psychodynamics of Antipolitical Popular Movements

Abstract I argue here that the term “populism” captures too much, including movements that are enthralled by a fantasied ideal as well as genuine movements for plural and popular sovereignty. The term is too often used to deride all popular movements, but this is to the detriment of genuinely political and democratic movements for democratic sovereignty. I distinguish popular movements that are genuinely political and generative from those that are regressive and anti-political. The latter, I argue using psychoanalytic theory, are melancholically clinging to a lost Thing, while democratic popular movements are open to creating new societies. To explore these differences I draw on Lacan and Klein whose theories point to the need for creatively working to create new collective identities rather than melancholically clinging to old ones.

Олицетворение в речи рассказчика-ребенка (на примере романов “Room” Э. Донохью и “All the Lost Things” М. Сакс)

The article examines personification in the speech of a child narrator. Along with other grammatical and lexical features of a child’s speech, the use of personification by children is distinguished. Personification in a child’s speech, as well as in human speech, can be explained by metaphorical nature of human thinking as well as anthropocentrism of human thinking and speech. Personification can be a characteristic of the speech of a child narrator in fiction intended for adult readership. It is worth noticing that the use of a child narrator as a device is not new in literature. In the course of research, we conducted an analysis of two modern novels written in English: Room by Emma Donoghue (2010) and All the Lost Things by Michelle Sacks (2019). The two novels tell the reader about a traumatic experience that happened to the children or their significant others. The novels discuss the topics of abuse (physical and psychological), abduction, isolation, lying and memory. The narrators in the chosen novels are children of preschool and primary school age (5 and 7 years old). The analysis of the narrators’ speech allowed us to find numerous examples of personification, expressed by different parts of speech. All the found examples can be divided into groups according to the object of personification: household items and objects of the world, parts of the human body, animals, abstract notions, plants, and inorganic nature. The analysis showed that personification as a characteristic of speech can fulfill several functions: make the narrator more plausible, express the narrator’s emotions, communicate the reader the information that is crucial for the understanding of the plot.

Symmetries and asymmetries in children's peer-group reading discussions

This paper reports a research project exploring children's peer interactions in group reading discussions where a teacher was not present as an authoritative guide. This context reflects a reality of classroom teaching where most children in the class are completing tasks independently while the teacher is working other groups. In the study, four quartets of ten year-old children in the UK and Mexico were recorded as they discussed different texts together and this paper reports the findings from their engagement with The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan. In the paper, we focus on the symmetries and asymmetries apparent in the children's peer talk to consider how they engage together to make meaning from the text they are reading. To this end we focus on two strands of analysis related to children's talk within their groups: (a) the function of utterances within their speech turns; and (b) the dynamics of the interaction, that is, the organisation of the talk into topical episodes. By considering these two strands of analysis, we are able to illuminate the nuances of a/symmetries in small-group reading contexts as we concentrate on how the children use language and action to influence the direction of, and contribute to, the discussions. The results find children authoritatively shifted the discussion forward into new topics using different means, and displayed evidence of high-level comprehension as they engaged with the ideas of each other. The two strands of analysis complemented each other as they illustrated not only the resources the children drew on to shift the movement of the discussion, but how their language enabled this movement forward. The results also highlighted differences in how the children perceived their goals and responsibilities within the task and groups.

ILLOCUTIONARY AND PERLOCUTIONARY ACTS IN THE NOVEL "THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS" BY JHON CONNOLY

<p>Abstract: Illocutionary act is an important part in order to understand the speech acts. It is related to the speaker’s intention in the conversation, and it can be seen from the utterances. In contrast, Perlocutionary act is the effect of the utterance which the speaker said to the hearer. This act does not consist of certain things in certain ways, but it is having certain effects. The literary works of concern for this study is The Book of Lost Things novel. The purpose of this paper is to describe the Illocutionary and Perlocutionary acts employed by the characters in the novel. The finding of this study indicates that the characters in The Book of Lost Things employed all types of Illocutionary acts and responding to that using Perlocutionary acts. It can be concluded that the used of Illocutionary and Perlocutionary acts can be found in this novel.</p><p>Key Words: illocutionary act; perlocutionary act; speech act; the book of lost things.</p>

Symmetries and asymmetries in children’s peer-group reading discussions

This paper reports a research project exploring children’s peer interactions in group reading discussions where a teacher was not present as an authoritative guide. This context reflects a reality of classroom teaching where most children in the class are completing tasks independently while the teacher is working other groups. In the study, four quartets of ten year-old children in the UK and Mexico were recorded as they discussed different texts together and this paper reports the findings from their engagement with The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan. In the paper, we focus on the symmetries and asymmetries apparent in the children’s peer talk to consider how they engage together to make meaning from the text they are reading. To this end we focus on two strands of analysis related to children’s talk within their groups: (a) the function of utterances within their speech turns; and (b) the dynamics of the interaction, that is, the organisation of the talk into topical episodes. By considering these two strands of analysis, we are able to illuminate the nuances of a/symmetries in small-group reading contexts as we concentrate on how the children use language and action to influence the direction of, and contribute to, the discussions. The results find children authoritatively shifted the discussion forward into new topics using different means, and displayed evidence of high-level comprehension as they engaged with the ideas of each other. The two strands of analysis complemented each other as they illustrated not only the resources the children drew on to shift the movement of the discussion, but how their language enabled this movement forward. The results also highlighted differences in how the children perceived their goals and responsibilities within the task and groups.

An interview with Shaun Tan

Abstract Shaun Tan is a Melbourne-based artist and author, whose work is celebrated worldwide for the beautiful, dynamic, and mesmerizing story worlds that it offers readers. In 2011, Tan received the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in honour of his contribution to international children’s literature, and an Academy Award for the short animated film adaptation of The Lost Thing (Ruheman and Tan 2011), which he directed with Andrew Ruhemann. Tan’s work ranges from drawing and painting, to sculpture and animation, whose complex themes, and sensitive nuances resist easy classification. Instead, his sometimes surreal, playful, and evocative stories immerse readers into new and productively strange places.

Emotion Resonance and Divergence: a semiotic analysis of music and sound in “The Lost Thing” an animated short film and “Elizabeth” a film trailer

ABSTRACTMusic and sound contributions of interpersonal meaning to film narratives may be different from or similar to meanings made by language and image, and dynamic interactions between several modalities may generate new story messages. Such interpretive potentials of music and voice sound in motion pictures are rarely considered in social semiotic investigations of intermodality. This paper therefore shares two semiotic studies of distinct and combined music, English speech and image systems in an animated short film and a promotional filmtrailer. The paper considers the impact of music and voice sound on interpretations of film narrative meanings. A music system relevant to the analysis of filmic emotion is proposed. Examples show how music and intonation contribute meaning to lexical, visual and gestural elements of the cinematic spaces. Also described are relations of divergence and resonance between emotion types in various couplings of music, intonation, words and images across story phases. The research is relevant to educational knowledge about sound, and semiotic studies of multimodality.

The Ostrich and Other Lost Things by Beth Hautala

Reviewed by: The Ostrich and Other Lost Things by Beth Hautala Karen Coats Hautala, Beth The Ostrich and Other Lost Things. Philomel, 2018 [288p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-399-54606-8 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-399-54608-2 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-8 Olivia’s older brother, Jacob, has lost his toy ostrich, and eleven-year-old Olivia is determined to find it, believing that the intensification of his autism-related melt-downs is related to anxiety over losing his favorite comfort object. A bad decision on her part leads to her having to do community service at a traveling zoo near her home, where she meets Charlie, the blind son of the zoo’s caretaker. Charlie and she become friends, so she enlists his help in solving another mystery: who’s letting the zoo’s ostrich out so that she ends up in Olivia’s yard several nights a week? Hautala draws these and other disparate plot threads together thematically as Olivia reflects in accessibly concrete ways on the various roles people play in the shows their families stage. While readers with neurodiverse siblings are the obvious audience for this, the anxieties Olivia expresses and her attempts to control outcomes will resonate with a much broader spectrum of tweens. Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Calculus of Loss and Gain

A Calculus of Loss and Gain Maggie Trapp On Amina Gautier's The Loss of All Lost Things In her short story collection, The Loss of All Lost Things, Amina Gautier exposes small scenes of misunderstanding and shares with us moments of connection. In these stories Gautier probes the inner lives of characters lost and searching, characters attempting to forge bonds, seeking redemption, and looking for answers. In "Navigator of Culture," we witness daughters and mothers, girls and women, as they work to understand each other in a world where fathers and men are absent. In "Most Honest," we watch as a recently divorced man yearns for the family he's lost even as he fails to understand or accept his own part in his losses. In "A Cup of My Time," we enter the world of a pregnant woman who has been told she might lose a child. This is a short, spare story whose most memorable character seems to be a mere bit player—the pregnant woman's landlord and neighbor, Mrs. Majumdar, who comes over to borrow this and that and whose impact on the narrator, as well as the reader, is profound in surprising ways. In the title story, "The Loss of All Lost Things," we are presented with a catalogue of what seems to be loss without end, loss that defines who we are and what we do. While the parents in this story are coming to terms with the fact that their young son is missing, they initiate a grief-inflected meditation on loss in general, offering up a mental calculation of sorts that, while seemingly infinite in scope, can never account for the despair of each individual loss: They are not the first to suffer loss. They try to keep it all in perspective, to think of the myriad things that have been lost. Such as: The Ark of the Covenant. The city of Atlantis. The Dead Sea Scrolls. El Dorado. The Holy Grail. Amelia Earhart, somewhere over the Pacific. Pompeii, buried beneath volcanic ash. The RMS Titanic, at the bottom of the sea. Other lost things are lost slowly, over time, rather than in one fell swoop. Such as: Loss of feeling, of limb and life. Loss of blood. Loss of memory. Loss of looks, of faith and time. Loss of sanity. Teeth lost under the pillow. Long-lost relatives—ignored, forgotten, and pretended away. They make these lists to humble themselves, remembering the way their parents attempted to cure picky eating habits with reminders of children starving in Africa, but the shaming tactic doesn't work. Try as they might to think of others who have it worse, all that they can think of is themselves. These parents invoke a limitless loss to in some way reckon their own monumental loss, which of course they can never do. Gautier's prose here is almost prosody. She manages to step back from the particulars of this one story to offer a lyrical listing that speaks to each of us. As with any good fiction, these stories are more than the sum of their parts. We witness characters lose what they love or question their long-held attachments, [End Page 1] but at the same time these stories touch us in ways that can't be summed up or paraphrased. In this collection what's left unsaid is often incredibly evocative, but there are a few times when the stories say too much, when Gautier could offer more nuance, more telling moments rather than spelling things out for us. Some of the stories are uneven, moving from lyrical and layered moments to more pedestrian prose that drops us out of the story's spell. In "Navigator of Culture" we read, "Holding a can of pear halves, she eyes me with pity and condescension. 'For your own self-respect, Hazel, please tell me you're not here to fulfill some sort of nostalgic wish to get your hair done like you used to when you were a little girl.'" It doesn't seem natural that a young woman would, in an otherwise fairly restrained conversation, suddenly offer such trenchant psychologizing. This moment would have...

Origin Story

Origin Story Hari Alluri (bio) Keywords poem, Hari Alluri i. The Goddess of Lost Things is no boat,no container for my seeking. I am sorryI know only that my mother's ancestors named herAnagolay—please allow me my invented version:how she came to be (there's a river in this story;I don't know where to put it). Let's say, in the beginning,there was pure consciousness,then jump to now, here, this city,in the green space between this mall's and thatapartment's parking lots, facing the woundin the trunk of this cherry tree, larger than your torso,shaped like an open human pelvis heart, a serratedlandscaper's blade in the innermost foldcamouflaged against the healing scar.Behind you, around that lone cedar, the sunfire and white rosepetals fade into the ground. When they do,whoever keeps leaving them here will no doubt bring more. You might wonder howsomebody could have died in this placebut this is the earth,whose every inch is rich in death's memoryand so you smileat the thought of lining the planet'sentire surface with petals,at the joyous grief all will fade,the simple fact that the act is nothingthe world hasn't already been doingsince the first petal changed its colorand you recall the sparklingsunset through a beer glasswhen your friend warned you that if you lose yourself [End Page 672] in any story, even a true one,eventually you lose that story as well. ii. There, in the mall lot to your right, two carsused to pull up next to each other after close,one driver getting out to join the other.I do not want my own desire to choose the make and model,the drivers' genders and styles of dress.What I know is this: they kiss and then relent.Then one evening, when no more lies that matter remainbetween them, they walk over to that patch of grass,hand in hand. Each releasespetals onto the ground beside the cedar tree.They make love, awash by that streetlampwhose light fluctuates the shadowsof the cherry tree's branches in the wind.It is the most beautiful lovemaking of either's life.They cry, feeling themselves close to returningto the memory of themselves before bodies were invented.Here is the summation of their loss:a sock-patch needle, an empty trunk, a tired deck of cards.The one who is left behind returns to this place,lays down among petals the way the two used to,imagines the other's body close at handinto release, does so every nighttill the petals are faded, offers once more,returns home to sacrifice the only life acceptable.The rose colors fade and no one comes to replace them. iii. If you invent this story, petals appear behind youto fade again. Someone has touched hands at the holy ground,which could be any ground, ancient and brand newgrass, chopped up gravel, river bed.Now you turn to surrender the story,knowing what we all know, that you must surrender it [End Page 673] before surrendering to it, the waywhat was alone sacrificed aloneness itselfin favor of a universe of objectsin relation, making my peopleinvent a goddess of lost things. [End Page 674] Hari Alluri hari alluri is the author of The Flayed City, Carving Ashes, and the chapbook The Promise of Rust. An award-winning poet, educator, and cofounding editor at Locked Horn Press, his work appears in anthologies, journals, and online venues, including Chautauqua, Poetry International, and on Split This Rock. He immigrated to Vancouver, Musqueam land, where he is working on a poetic intervention into the story of Ekalavya. Copyright © 2018 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

The Train of Lost Things by Ammi-Joan Paquette

The Train of Lost Things by Ammi-Joan Paquette

「失いつづけたすべてのものの打ち上げられる場所」と「行くべきところ」との間で : 文学教育の「転回」と「希望」のために( 「文学教育の転回と希望」を受けて)

「失いつづけたすべてのものの打ち上げられる場所」と「行くべきところ」との間で : 文学教育の「転回」と「希望」のために( 「文学教育の転回と希望」を受けて)

Journeys through the <i>Unheimlich</i> and the Unhomely

With World War II breaking out, David, twelve-year-old hero of John Connolly’s Book of Lost Things (2006), is failing to come to terms with his mother’s death and his father’s swift remarriage. Lured into the world of his whispering books, he journeys deep into the unheimlich, as familiar and beloved fairy tales turn macabre and reveal the hidden. In Robert Westall’s Gulf(1993), twelve-year-old Andy journeys telepathically into the consciousness of Latif, a boy caught in the midst of the Gulf War. Transmitting back the brutal realities of war, Andy’s journeys disrupt his domestic life; the external world pierces the anodyne fabric created by sanitised newscasts, turning home unhomely for him and his family.Following Joseph Campbell’s assertion that every story relates the hero’s journey, this paper analyses the psychological journey of David through the lens of Freud’s theory of the unheimlich, in which the deeply familiar turns incongruous or uncanny, as that which is hidden or repressed comes to light. It then proceeds to examine Andy’s journey, employing Homi Bhabha’s extension of Freud’s unheimlich in his concept of the “unhomely”, which Bhabha defines not as the state of being homeless, but as the sense of dislocation that arises when the boundaries between outside world and domestic home crumble. This paper aims to support Roberta Seelinger Trites’ claim that the unheimlich is a crucially motivating factor in children’s literature by examining the unheimlich in the journey motif.

Threnody by an Amateur Oceanographer for His Father the Biologist

Threnody by an Amateur Oceanographer for His Father the Biologist Cole Bucciaglia (bio) Simon's father was drowned by a sea monster. It first flashed an open-mouthed grin, folding and unfolding its big, pink tongue harmlessly. But then it closed its jaws around the man's body until little more was visible than one leg, which hung almost comically from its mouth. It pulled away from dry land until they were both submerged, father still caught between its little rows of uniform teeth. As it dove, it left behind a trail of blood, uncurling through the water like red smoke. Simon's mother let him carry the urn holding all that had been recovered of his father's remains when they went to scatter them at sea. The container wasn't meant for display—a simple bullet thermos pressed between his hands like a large, black bishop. The dead biologist's coworkers took them out in a schooner on a calm and sunny day, and no one spoke but the boat as it sighed and trembled against the push of the wind. Simon imagined that he might somehow lose his grip on the urn before it was time, and that the wind would carry it up and away from him, over the side of the boat and into the water. With the lid still tightly on, his father would be forever trapped inside the urn, locked away from the sea and incomplete. He thought the ashes would be fine and smooth like gray sand, but they were instead gravelly, with little rough rocks that Simon would later realize were bits of bone. His mother bent down beside him until she was closer to his height, and she held his waist as he reached to pour the ashes down along the side of the boat and into the water. They didn't fall in a steady, gray stream but puffed out a bit into a whitish cloud, and it was all very simple and final and un-miraculous. Everyone waved farewell. After that, something shifted inside Simon, who had spent all of his life in a house by the sea. When the surface of the ocean glittered, he now imagined that it was because the light was reflecting off his father's particles. It was pretty, looking down on the water's surface from above, but underneath there was a boneyard for dead and lost things, and Simon understood that there were dangerous creatures in the ocean. He used to love the ocean's creatures. When he was very small, [End Page 54] he had a nightlight that projected blue ripples and colorful fish onto his walls, and that lulled him to sleep. He knelt in the wet sand by the ocean and pressed his fingers into the mud, searching for white Emerita and fearlessly letting them scuttle along his arms. His father, the biologist, taught him the names for aquatic things. Years before Simon had any reason to be afraid of killer whales, the biologist held Simon's hand up to the nose of a captive orca. Its skin was harder than it looked like it would be, rubbery like a wet inner tube. The whale pulsed against his palm and snorted in the soft, deep voice of a horse. The year before Simon's father died, he brought the family with him on a trip to Puerto Rico, and Simon swam in the gentle waves of a bioluminescent bay, incandescent flecks of blue plankton all around him, and his parents' dark and hazy ghosts on the shore. ________ The summer after his father's death, Simon avoided walking down to the beach for the very first time in his life. He could hear the hushed breathing of the ocean from any room in his house. He tried not to look at it. With his curtains drawn, he spent most days in his bedroom playing computer games. At night, he dreamt of people he knew drowning and of a great, big jawbone stretched over the earth where the sky should be, teeth like menacing stalactites. In July, the tourists came to town, and the family—father, mother, and two...

Przekład książki obrazkowej na przykładzie twórczości Shauna Tana

The article concentrates on the translation of visual literature in general and the translation of picturebooks in particular. It first discusses the specificity of this kind of literature and overviews the research on the translation of picturebooks, especially with regard to the various types of relationships between words and pictures and the ways in which such relationships may be transformed in translation. In the second part, the article focuses on the artistic output of Australian writer and illustrator Shaun Tan. It examines the Polish translations of two picturebook stories by this author, that is The Red Tree and The Lost Thing, published by Kultura Gniewu in 2014. The article emphasizes that a picturebook is a special kind of text in which the message is conveyed by interdependent words and pictures, which both contribute to communicating meaning that neither could express alone. Although seemingly simple to translate, a picturebook may nevertheless constitute a challenge for the translator. The article also sheds light on the translation of the words that are an integral part of illustrations, the result of the cooperation between translators, graphic artists and editors.

The Loss of All Lost Things by Amina Gautier

The Loss of All Lost Things by Amina Gautier

Gertie Milk & the Keeper of Lost Things by Simon Van Booy

Reviewed by: Gertie Milk & the Keeper of Lost Things by Simon Van Booy Elizabeth Bush Van Booy, Simon Gertie Milk & the Keeper of Lost Things. Razorbill, 2017 [256p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-44849-458-6 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-44849-460-9 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 4-7 Gertie Milk—or at least that’s who she assumes she is from the tag inside her sodden gown—awakes on a beach on an apparently deserted island, but her presence is quickly noted by a threatening worm, a flock of flightless birds, and eventually, a man named Kolt, who is not as surprised to see her as she might expect. She is another of his kind, destined to be a Keeper of Lost Things, whose job it is to take the commands of the Big Dusty Book Upstairs and return disappeared items to their owners in various time periods. The store rooms of are overflowing, and as lost limbs and misplaced sporting equipment escape their designated areas and create havoc, the lack of KOLT personnel is getting critical. Gertie’s still a little unclear her own vanished identity, but she soon musters enthusiasm for her new job and travels with her mentor through time, name-checking important people and events as they go. The story can be an immersive one at times, but Van Booy places few controls on the magic/sci fi and the plot takes on a make-it-up-as-you-go air that is less than satisfying. There are bad guys to encounter, and it’s hinted that one in particular will make Gertie’s life even harder in a subsequent volume. One hopes Van Booy will fine-tune his promising premise in future outings. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois