The Book of Lost Things

“Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination, and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David’s mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.”

David’s mother instills in him a love for, and wonder of, stories. Connolly introduces the theme of stories early in the novel to prepare the reader for the role stories will have in constructing the land David will enter and the events that take place there. This quote highlights his point that stories are more than just words on a page; they have a life of their own that crosses the boundary into the reader’s world, and they have the power to transform.

“They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves. They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied. The world of the old tales existed parallel to ours, as David’s mother had once told him, but sometimes the wall separating the two became so thin and brittle that the two worlds started to blend into each other.”

Connolly draws attention to old fairytale stories to further the idea that stories and the worlds within them have magical qualities. David’s mother’s assertion about worlds blending together foreshadows the world David will cross into. The world David will enter is shaped by twisted versions of the old fairytales David and his mother treasured.

“This new world was too painful to cope with. He had tried so hard. He had kept to his routines. He had counted so carefully. He had abided by the rules, but life had cheated. This world was not like the world of his stories. In that world, good was rewarded and evil was punished.”

David sees the real world through the lens of his beloved stories, in which good triumphs and evil is defeated. When his daily routines fail to save his mother’s life, he feels like life has been unfair and has deviated from the rules he so carefully constructed. However, during his journey to the king, David sees the emptiness of his routines and replaces them with purposeful practices.