Title: Lost in the Moment and Found
Series: Wayward Children #8
Author: Seanan McGuire
Genre: Portal Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: Parent death, gaslighting, threatened child abuse, threatened child sexual abuse, pregnancy (mentions)
Spoiler Warning: This book is eighth in a series, but it is essentially a stand-alone adventure and neither the book nor this review contain spoilers of previous books.
Back Cover:
Welcome to the Shop Where the Lost Things Go.
If you ever lost a sock, you’ll find it here. If you ever wondered about favorite toy from childhood… it’s probably sitting on a shelf in the back. And the headphones that you swore that this time you’d keep safe? You guessed it….
Antoinette has lost her father. Metaphorically. He’s not in the shop, and she’ll never see him again. But when Antsy finds herself lost (literally, this time), she finds that however many doors open for her, leaving the Shop for good might not be as simple as it sounds.
And stepping through those doors exacts a price.
Lost in the Moment and Found tells us that childhood and innocence, once lost, can never be found.
Review:
The Wayward Children books are fundamentally not happy stories – despite the magic and often whimsy of the magical adventures, the stories are underscored by trauma. As the series goes on, it seems to lean even further into those underlying traumatic aspects. Where the Drowned Girls Go explored the trauma of getting spit back into a world where there is no place left for them, and Lost in the Moment and Found explores the other traumas – the things that made them go through the doors in the first place and the things that happen to them on the other side.
One of the most remarkable things about previous books in the series was how remarkably relatable they were. Lost in the Moment and Found was not to that level of extreme relatability. I think some of that might be me, though, as most of Antsy’s experiences in this book are just not ones I share. If you have experienced similar things, she’ll probably be more relatable. I did feel like Seanan McGuire nailed the experience of being a child as usual, but I didn’t find it quite as immersive this time around.
Unlike earlier books in the series, this book spends much more time on the trauma than on the cool magical worlds. (And as fun as I think it would be to explore the Shop Where the Lost Things Go, it’s not nearly as fun to read about.) It’s sad, poignant, and heartbreaking, and about the literal and metaphorical loss of childhood to trauma as well as brief meditations on the nature of loss and being lost in the first place. There also are some interesting details about how and why the doors actually work, which was quite interesting.
I should have suspected that this is the direction the series would end up heading after Where the Drowned Girls Go, but I guess I still think of the series as mostly dark whimsy like the earlier books. Lost in the Moment and Found isn’t bad at all. It’s just significantly more intense and down to earth than I was expecting. It’s dark and sad and definitely not my favorite Wayward Children book just for lack of that intense relatability that many of the others have, but it was absolutely good and wroth reading regardless.
Bluejay Reads 