"He was her North, her South, her East, her West, Her working week and Sunday vest, She was his moon and stars and favorite song, They thought that love would last forever: they weren’t wrong."
The idea behind this story is magically off beat, and there is absolutely nothing I love more than an offbeat story. Anthony is a man that has dedicated his life to finding lost things and holding on to them just in case the owner comes out of the woodwork searching for it. He saves buttons, hair bobbles, umbrellas, and a biscuit tin of what he thinks may be human remains.
When his life comes to an end, he leaves his house and everything in it to the woman who dedicated her life to cooking and cleaning his house. She is left with all of the lost things he found over the years and a request by Anthony to reunite something of importance to its owner.
The first couple chapters of The Keeper of Lost Things were so unique and beautiful and I had hope the rest of the book would follow the rythm of the beginning, but unfortunately that was not the case. This book was incredibly slow. It is only 270 some odd pages, but I felt like I was tackling a much lengthier novel. The very beginning and the very end are magical touchstones, but the middle is a very tedious build up to pull off a very predictable happy ending.
The bright gem of this novel were the interspersed short stories that Anthony wrote about the lost things he found. They were both dark and beautiful and I wish I would have read an entire book that compiled the lost things he kept and his hypothesis of how they were lost. That would have made for a much more compelling novel in my opinion.
2/5 Stars
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