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2.72 AVERAGE
2.72 AVERAGE
I really need to stop reading Gregory Maguire. I hated this one. Hated it. It dragged on and went no where. The plot points seem to be pull out of hat. Jack the Ripper, Dicken's Scrooge, Irish hookers, German fortune teller, baking cats, Medieval Norman ghosts. And what leads the main character, Winnie, to travel to France made my eyes roll and say "Really, this is what we are doing now?"
Listening to the audiobook was definitely a minus on top of everything. The Wendy-Winnie passages were really hard to keep straight. A lot of the time, I couldn't decide if I was in a flashback, the present day, or the make up story Winnie was writing for her novel. It didn't help that they all had John in them.
Listening to the audiobook was definitely a minus on top of everything. The Wendy-Winnie passages were really hard to keep straight. A lot of the time, I couldn't decide if I was in a flashback, the present day, or the make up story Winnie was writing for her novel. It didn't help that they all had John in them.
Wasn't too impressed with this one. Loved Wicked and thought the rest of that series went downhill after the first one. Thinking maybe I'll read Confessions of an Evil Stepsister once I exhaust my other books....so it'll be awhile.
I've read many other Maguire books, including the Oz series, and I don't feel this one was up to the quality of the others. In fact, this is the second time I've read Lost because I forgot that I had read it before and didn't care for it the first time. Not to be punny, but I felt a little lost by the plot and which thread I was supposed to follow with the main character, as if there were competing story lines with A Christmas Carol and Alice in Wonderland and a bit of Peter Pan. Personally I have a hard time with main characters that I find unsympathetic. But that it a personal issue and has nothing to do with Mr. Maguire's writing, because there are definitely moments in which I feel for Winnie and what she had gone through up to the present in the book. Overall I find it to be a good book but not compelling to me.
The things I didn't like about this book don't make it a bad book, I just didn't enjoy it. At all.
I struggled to invest in the characters and the plot, although this fact can be used to demonstrate Maguire's skill as a writer, as we experience the turmoil of the protagonist (Winnie) struggling to invest in her own life and her novel, attempting to work through her problems in fiction and becoming disassociated with reality. The shifts between Maguire's narrative and Winnie's “ novel-within-a-novel” and the snatches of other works Maguire references when Winnie calls on them to give her comfort are, I suspect, supposed to involve us in the mystery of Winnie's trauma whilst having us empathise with her through reading the fragmented text. Mostly I found it frustrating and off-putting, though this may have been the point.
All in all, there's nothing particularity wrong with it, it just wasn't my cup of tea.
I struggled to invest in the characters and the plot, although this fact can be used to demonstrate Maguire's skill as a writer, as we experience the turmoil of the protagonist (Winnie) struggling to invest in her own life and her novel, attempting to work through her problems in fiction and becoming disassociated with reality. The shifts between Maguire's narrative and Winnie's “ novel-within-a-novel” and the snatches of other works Maguire references when Winnie calls on them to give her comfort are, I suspect, supposed to involve us in the mystery of Winnie's trauma whilst having us empathise with her through reading the fragmented text. Mostly I found it frustrating and off-putting, though this may have been the point.
All in all, there's nothing particularity wrong with it, it just wasn't my cup of tea.
Strange...like you are reading two books at once (not that we all haven't done that.) This is also supposed to be a spinoff of A Christmas Carol when the most that it does is mention it a couple of times. Much better than Wicked though, I could actually read all of this one. :/
The central thesis of Lost by Gregory Maguire is that people are haunted not by ghosts, but by themselves and their own failures, stresses and worries for the future. For Winifred Rudge her ghosts are a failed marriage, her stalled writing career and her fears of never writing again.
Winifred Rudge, an author of children's fiction, has gone to London to work on an adult novel that has been rattling around in her head for a while. She plans to stay with an old friend but he's gone missing. In his place she finds superstitious builders trying (and failing) to do a quick remodel on the flat.
While Winifred is there she is the flat begins to manifest strange sounds, foul odors and the pattern of a cross with a zigzag through it. All of these events distract Winifred from her writing. Instead of working she works through a number of theories to figure out what is going on with the flat and more importantly what has happened to her missing friend.
Gregory Maguire starts with a well known story and then writes his own. He's best known for Wicked which tries to imagine the back story for the Wicked Witch of the West. For Lost he starts with A Christmas Carol and creates something that is half chick lit and half Gothic horror. Wicked and Lost are very different in style and form. Everything I wished he had done in Wicked he has done in Lost.
I didn't enjoy Wicked because it was too different in tone and setting from Oz as it was described in the Baum books. Oz was Oz in name only and was entirely disappointing to me having read most of the books numerous times. A Christmas Carol is another book I've read dozens of times but this time the link to Lost is thematic only. Instead of trying to write within Dickens's London and Scrooge's circle of acquaintances, Maguire sets the novel in modern-day London with a fictional family purporting to have a link to Charles Dickens and kinship to a man who may have been the inspiration for Scrooge. By using A Christmas Carol as a starting point, rather than a blueprint, Maguire manages to create a suspenseful Gothic horror with a chick lit facade. This book that I expected to hate ended up being one of the best (and scariest) novels I've this year.
Winifred Rudge, an author of children's fiction, has gone to London to work on an adult novel that has been rattling around in her head for a while. She plans to stay with an old friend but he's gone missing. In his place she finds superstitious builders trying (and failing) to do a quick remodel on the flat.
While Winifred is there she is the flat begins to manifest strange sounds, foul odors and the pattern of a cross with a zigzag through it. All of these events distract Winifred from her writing. Instead of working she works through a number of theories to figure out what is going on with the flat and more importantly what has happened to her missing friend.
Gregory Maguire starts with a well known story and then writes his own. He's best known for Wicked which tries to imagine the back story for the Wicked Witch of the West. For Lost he starts with A Christmas Carol and creates something that is half chick lit and half Gothic horror. Wicked and Lost are very different in style and form. Everything I wished he had done in Wicked he has done in Lost.
I didn't enjoy Wicked because it was too different in tone and setting from Oz as it was described in the Baum books. Oz was Oz in name only and was entirely disappointing to me having read most of the books numerous times. A Christmas Carol is another book I've read dozens of times but this time the link to Lost is thematic only. Instead of trying to write within Dickens's London and Scrooge's circle of acquaintances, Maguire sets the novel in modern-day London with a fictional family purporting to have a link to Charles Dickens and kinship to a man who may have been the inspiration for Scrooge. By using A Christmas Carol as a starting point, rather than a blueprint, Maguire manages to create a suspenseful Gothic horror with a chick lit facade. This book that I expected to hate ended up being one of the best (and scariest) novels I've this year.
I listened to this book in the car, and I decided to give Maguire another try. This book, which was about the supposed true story behind A Christmas Carol's hauntings, was a bit slow for the first half to two-thirds. I think part of the problem was that I did not care about the narrator too much, a woman with some Scrooge-like tendencies. The book does take an interesting turn near the end, but it wasn't enough to make me say that I enjoyed the book.
This book...sent me on like a 3-month stretch of barely getting any reading done. It has a weird beginning, an interesting/mysterious early middle, a snore fest of a later middle, and a fairly amusing home stretch in the last 20% or so. The problem is that the snore-fest part felt unending at the time, and it was depressing seeing how much was left of the book.
It features Winnie Rudge, a descendant of the supposed inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. She is not so different from her ancestor--she is harsh and cold with others and seems to try to keep everyone at arm's length. She goes to England to visit Rudge House, the old family flat her d-bag cousin commandeered despite not even being related to Rudge. At this point various, possibly connected mysterious start to form.
This barely ekes out a 3/5 for me because it hit on enough of my soft spots--ghosts, genealogy, literary connections, England, and a historical mystery unraveling in the present. Note that while it is inspired by Dickens' novella, it does not really repeat or refer to that story in much of any way. It is its own story with the Scrooge story in the background.
It features Winnie Rudge, a descendant of the supposed inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. She is not so different from her ancestor--she is harsh and cold with others and seems to try to keep everyone at arm's length. She goes to England to visit Rudge House, the old family flat her d-bag cousin commandeered despite not even being related to Rudge. At this point various, possibly connected mysterious start to form.
This barely ekes out a 3/5 for me because it hit on enough of my soft spots--ghosts, genealogy, literary connections, England, and a historical mystery unraveling in the present. Note that while it is inspired by Dickens' novella, it does not really repeat or refer to that story in much of any way. It is its own story with the Scrooge story in the background.
Sorry I could not possibly finish this book. I got almost halfway through and NOTHING happened, I was bored out of my mind. I hate to do this but, I DNFed this.
2019 is the year where I stop wasting my times on books that I hate, and this is one of them. Bye!
2019 is the year where I stop wasting my times on books that I hate, and this is one of them. Bye!
Where do I start? I've always wanted to read "wicked" I've heard amazing stuff about it but, the only book i could find by Gregory Maguire was "lost". the blurb seemed interesting and I decided why not? it seems like decent read, yeeeah...no.
it was SO disappointing, took me forever to get through this book! and the end wasn't even satisfying! let alone the plot itself felt inconsistent and at times even forced! i gave it 2 starts because it wasn't SO bad that i could not finish it, too bad that when i actually did, it left me thinking "wait, huh?! that's IT?!"
Not even sure i want to give "wicked" a shot now...
it was SO disappointing, took me forever to get through this book! and the end wasn't even satisfying! let alone the plot itself felt inconsistent and at times even forced! i gave it 2 starts because it wasn't SO bad that i could not finish it, too bad that when i actually did, it left me thinking "wait, huh?! that's IT?!"
Not even sure i want to give "wicked" a shot now...