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A review by karieh13
The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay
3.0
“The Secret of Lost Things” is the latest in a long-ish list of books about characters that love books. This year I’ve enjoyed “The Thirteenth Tale”, “The Shadow of the Wind” and the latest by Jasper Fforde…all more than I enjoyed this book by Sheridan Hay.
The plot elements intrigued me…a sheltered girl from Tasmania moves to New York following the death of her mother, is drawn to an begins work at a “emporium of used and rare books called the Arcade”, a possible lost then found manuscript of Herman Melville’s…
And yet…after the first few chapters…I found myself drifting off. The pace of the book was too slow, tempting me to skim over parts of the book. The characters of the novel, while colorful, were not very compelling. And at times, the colorful bits just seemed too “over the top”.
“In fact, as I walked behind him, Geist’s white ears reminded me of delicate sea creatures suddenly exposed to light, vulnerable and nude. There was a shrinking quality to him, a retraction from attention like an instinctual retreat from exposure. I was fascinated and repulsed by equal measure, a contradiction that was never to leave me.”
On one hand, I appreciate the Dickensian creatures that inhabit The Arcade, and I suppose they are all the more mysterious and interesting to a young girl who was discouraged from meeting other people by her mother…but at the end of the day, I just didn’t believe in them.
I love bookstores. I love the smell of the paper and ink, the smell of dust, the possibility that I will discover a hidden treasure…I could spend hours in a good bookstore. And yet? Maybe I am too old to be enchanted by a description like this.
“Try to see this place for what it is.” “And what’s that, Arthur?” “Well, a bookstore, but also a reliquary for the bones of strange creatures. Mermaids’ tails, unicorn horns…that sort of thing. You’re looking at natural history in this place.”
There were, however, small treasures to be found in “The Secret of Lost Things”. There are moments of genuine emotion that pour out of two of the characters that have let life pass them by, who mourn for that which never was. A sentence here, a paragraph there drew me back in enough so that I finished the book. (And a small bit of applause for Hay, who seems to think about giving the reader the ending that s/he expects...the one the book has been hinting at all along…and instead...takes a better route.)
And here and there – I find something that reminds me of my love of books.
“No doubt my fondness for the Rare Book Room came in part from a sense of familiarity. It was a version of Foy’s hat workroom from childhood visits to Sydney. There were no piles of skins, no wall of drawers filled with bric-a-brac, but each old volume amounted to something like the same thing. A book was like a drawer: one opened it and notions flew out.”
In “The Secret of Lost Things” – the drawer that I opened yielded only bits of sparkle instead of a treasure.
The plot elements intrigued me…a sheltered girl from Tasmania moves to New York following the death of her mother, is drawn to an begins work at a “emporium of used and rare books called the Arcade”, a possible lost then found manuscript of Herman Melville’s…
And yet…after the first few chapters…I found myself drifting off. The pace of the book was too slow, tempting me to skim over parts of the book. The characters of the novel, while colorful, were not very compelling. And at times, the colorful bits just seemed too “over the top”.
“In fact, as I walked behind him, Geist’s white ears reminded me of delicate sea creatures suddenly exposed to light, vulnerable and nude. There was a shrinking quality to him, a retraction from attention like an instinctual retreat from exposure. I was fascinated and repulsed by equal measure, a contradiction that was never to leave me.”
On one hand, I appreciate the Dickensian creatures that inhabit The Arcade, and I suppose they are all the more mysterious and interesting to a young girl who was discouraged from meeting other people by her mother…but at the end of the day, I just didn’t believe in them.
I love bookstores. I love the smell of the paper and ink, the smell of dust, the possibility that I will discover a hidden treasure…I could spend hours in a good bookstore. And yet? Maybe I am too old to be enchanted by a description like this.
“Try to see this place for what it is.” “And what’s that, Arthur?” “Well, a bookstore, but also a reliquary for the bones of strange creatures. Mermaids’ tails, unicorn horns…that sort of thing. You’re looking at natural history in this place.”
There were, however, small treasures to be found in “The Secret of Lost Things”. There are moments of genuine emotion that pour out of two of the characters that have let life pass them by, who mourn for that which never was. A sentence here, a paragraph there drew me back in enough so that I finished the book. (And a small bit of applause for Hay, who seems to think about giving the reader the ending that s/he expects...the one the book has been hinting at all along…and instead...takes a better route.)
And here and there – I find something that reminds me of my love of books.
“No doubt my fondness for the Rare Book Room came in part from a sense of familiarity. It was a version of Foy’s hat workroom from childhood visits to Sydney. There were no piles of skins, no wall of drawers filled with bric-a-brac, but each old volume amounted to something like the same thing. A book was like a drawer: one opened it and notions flew out.”
In “The Secret of Lost Things” – the drawer that I opened yielded only bits of sparkle instead of a treasure.