The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer is a charming, heartfelt novel about the power of storytelling and the journey to find yourself. The story follows Emma, a young woman who discovers an old, unfinished manuscript that leads her on an adventure to uncover the truth about its mysterious author. As she gets deeper into the story, Emma begins to learn important lessons about love, loss, and the courage it takes to follow your heart.

The author has a way of making the characters feel real, with emotions and struggles that many readers can relate to. The book mixes mystery, romance, and a little bit of magic, all while exploring what it means to be part of a larger story, whether it’s your own or someone else’s.

What stands out most about The Lost Story is its ability to make you think about the connections we have with others and the stories that shape us. It’s a gentle reminder that sometimes the greatest adventures are the ones we take in our own lives.

This is not my normal genre but after i started reading i really enjoyed the story and this book.

The writing was easy to following and it was good character build, development and the suspense was also good makes you want to keep reading. It was easy to get invested with the characters and overall just really enjoyed the book and would recommend.

I will read more from this author.

Thanks NetGalley for letting me read and review.

While I enjoyed The Lost Story, I didn't feel very attached to the characters. I felt like I was being told more than being showed what the characters emotions were, which took me out of the story more that I cared for. I had to slog through the first half to get to the action and payoff in the second half. Usually I would have DNFed much sooner than I did, but I really wanted to see where Meg Shaffer was going with this one. The adventure and whimsy really saved this book in the end.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

It was a nice retelling but I had already had a book that felt so much more real to me in it's Narnia vibes. It might have been a better read if I had read it first or far enough out from the other.

When I read Meg Shaffer's The Wishing Game, it became an immediate favorite. I wasn't sure her new book could possibly compete, and I was SO glad to be proved wrong.

As children, Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell went missing for 6 months in the West Virginia forest, only to reappear unable to explain where they'd been or what happened in their absence. All grown up, Rafe is a reclusive artist who's still dealing with the internal aftermath of what happened while he was missing. Jeremy is a famed missing persons investigator— and Emilie Wendell's only hope for finding her sister who went missing from the same forest. Here's the thing... Jeremy knows exactly what happened so many years ago, and he's kept quiet to keep Rafe safe. Now, the two former lost boys must reunite and travel back to the magical land where they disappeared to decades before to face the secrets and the danger they escaped in an effort to find Emilie's missing sister. This book is magical and imaginative and anything but predictable. I know I'll be recommending Meg Shaffer and rushing to read everything she writes from now on!

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for the digital ARC of ” The Lost Story” in exchange for my honest opinion. I wasn’t sure if this was the book for me considering it is fantasy and that is not what I normally read. I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I got into the story. I shouldn’t have been surprised since I enjoyed her other novel, “The Wishing Game”, which was a five star read for me. This book brings you in quickly with good character, development, suspense, and setting. By the time the fantasy part became the main plot. I was already invested in the characters. Overall, I enjoyed the story and would recommend it to other readers. As the author states, “All books are magic…..Loving or hating people made out of ink and paper, not flesh and blood? Yes, books are magic. Maybe even the strongest there is.”

The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer is a gorgeous fairy tale for adults. Two boys, lost in the woods for six months, turn out not to have been lost at all, but to have slipped through a magical, Narnia-like opening into another world inhabited by magic trees, unicorns, Valkyrie warriors, and ghostly demons.

The book starts with the boys returning to their own world, in the West Virginia forest. The story of their "real lives" is actually quite interesting, but things get weird and wonderful when circumstances compel them to return to the magical world of Shanandoah.

This reminded me of The House in The Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune, and of course of the C.S. Lewis Narnia stories.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I featured this book in a new release video prior to publication and was very excited to read a Narnia retelling! I adore a portal fantasy, and to have this one also so set in real life is wonderful. I love the mystery aspect to this story as well. Will update when final review posts, but I'm expecting 5 stars!

I loved this fairy tale with a gay romance. It surprised me. I recommend this book for anyone who likes fantasy or adventure. I hope to see more from this delightful author.

I had such high hopes for this book. The Wishing Game was one of my top books of 2023, so I couldn't wait to read this one. Unfortunately, it fell flat for me. The premise sounds great-Rafe and Jeremy went missing for 6 months when they were teenagers with no explanation of where they'd been. Now, 15 years later, Jeremy has been hired by Emilie to find out what happened to her half-sister, who went missing in the same area Jeremy and Rafe did many years ago. This story held so much promise but it just didn't work for me. It took too long to get to the heart of the story and was very predictable. To be honest, I skimmed the last 1/3 of the book because I just wanted to be finished.

This was a like and not a love for me, which is disappointing because I really enjoyed Wishing Game! It didn’t bother me that it felt like two different books - the transition from the first to second half moved smoothly enough. What did bother me was that the back half felt almost YA?? And then there were some dirty jokes to balance it out, like see this book is for adults, heh heh! It didn’t work for me. The book was extremely formulaic to the point that it felt like certain things were included because they were supposed to be, rather than because they belonged. I didn't feel swept up in the magic the way I wanted to. It was close! But just far enough that it felt discordant rather than harmonious. Ahhh I’m disappointed. Also, Rafe and Jeremy weren’t different enough for me to easily keep track of them. I kept switching them in my mind and every time one of them would say or do something I would have to think so hard to determine which one they were that eventually I just gave up. Emilie was quite a stand out, her personality was really unique so that was something positive.

2.5 rounded up because it wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t for me.

Cute. I’d read the sequel if one is written. 3.5 stars. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy.

There was a lot to love about this modern take on fairy tales. I loved the blending of fantasy and magical realism, and I thought the queer representation worked perfectly here. There's also a lot of sensitivity surrounding trauma and domestic abuse, which is woven into the story pretty seamlessly. However, there was something missing from this book that kept me from rating it 5 stars, and I'm not even entirely clear what it was. Perhaps it was the fact that the dialogue didn't always work in some places, and although that's a minor thing, I think it might have prevented me from becoming completely entrenched in the story. Overall, I do think Shaffer is a talented writer, and I'm excited to read "Wishing Game" now.

This book was so good. I loved “The Wishing Game”, so I was really looking forward to this. It’s Chronicles of Narnia with a pet rat, found family (in more ways than one), and a love story. I didn’t want it to end. I could’ve read another 500 pages of this story.

This book was so good. I loved “The Wishing Game”, so I was really looking forward to this. It’s Chronicles of Narnia with a pet rat, found family (in more ways than one), and a love story. I didn’t want it to end. I could’ve read another 500 pages of this story.

I loved Meg Shaffer's first book, The Wishing Game, and was eager to read her second. And in this latest book, Shaffer's ability to write whimsical tales filled with heart and lovable characters continues to shine. Though The Lost Story begins slowly and it took me a bit to get into the story, it is a wonderful story inspired by Narnia. I enjoyed the fresh take on the tale and how I didn't know exactly how the book would end. I would recommend this to those interested in a story filled with adventure, found family vibes, and heart.

This was definitely interesting. The story didn’t go where I thought it was going to with them going back into the fantasy world but I liked the reminiscence to Narnia . There didn’t seem to be as much of a connection between the sisters even when they found her. This wasn’t as good to me as The Wishing Game but I think it was still a good fantasy read.

Thank you netgalley for the arc of lost story in exchange for my honest review. Jeremy and Ralph go missing in the woods and no one can find them. Eventually they come back but mysteriously they dont look starved and they have both grown. Ralph cant remember a thing and Jeremy is left with the gift of finding missing people. He then helps people find their missing family members. The story from there gets magical and unbelievable with unicorns and lost boys. Three stars

This is an interesting Chronicles of Narnia-esc story, with a door to a fantasy world hidden within a large tree in the Red Crow State Forest within West Virginia.

Emilie Wendell sequesters the help of Jeremy Cox a famous missing persons investigator and Ralph(Rafe) Howell to search the Red Crow State Forest for the remains of her sister who was kidnapped 20 years prior. Jeremy and Rafe themselves went missing around age 15 in Red Crow State Forest 5 years after Emilie's sister, and were found after six months in the same forest as healthy and fit (if not more so) than when they went missing.

It's a compelling story, and overall well written, though there were a few things that bothered me. First, after every chapter or two there would be a brief chapter maybe a paragraph in length called "Storyteller Corner" where the author would speak directly to the reader about things that just happened or were about to happen. At first I found Storyteller Corner strange and unwelcome breaking my immersion to provide commentary I felt was unnecessary, I quickly grew used to it and didn't mind it much. As the story progressed and things got interesting I found myself irritated as storyteller corner continued popping up with exposition I didn't want or need when I just wanted to continue on with the story.

The second issue I had (some decent spoilers here so if you don't want those skip to the next paragraph), it turns out the entire story was written and forgotten about by Emilie's sister Shannon before she went missing. Shannon's story didn't come to life plucking her out of her world because she was special or some fey creature took an interest and decided to make her fantasies a reality, but because of a certain apparently magical pencil she had written it with. It's just weird and in my opinion doesn't read very well.

Overall it's not a bad book, an easy read with a sort of redeeming action taken by the antagonist near the end. If you enjoy expeditions into other worlds, things like The Chronicles of Narnia, Peter Pan, etcetera, you will likely enjoy this book or at least a chunk of it.

Thank you for the gifted copy of this book.

I didn't think I would like this one as much as The Wishing Game, but I think I might have liked it even more!! I was hooked from. the first page, and I'm still thinking about this book a week after finishing it.,

I absolutely loved the three main characters and how their stories were divulged and intertwined more and more as I read. Yes, you have to really step outside of reality but that's the whole point of fantasy/magical realism, isn't it?

The more I read, the more I fell in love with Emilie, Jeremy, and Rafe, and the whole world of Shenandoah. I can't imagine how hard it was for Jeremy to keep everything from Rafe over the years, and for Rafe to know something was missing but not what. I love how it all played out in the end, and the last couple of chapters had me speed reading to find out how everything turns out.

So well done - and now I'll be anxiously awaiting her next book!