fiction – Tiana Feng

It’s never too late to start over. Even if you are an 100 year old man who is stuck in a nursing home. That’s the premise of of this Jonas Jonassan novel.

100 year old Alan jumps out the window in the beginning of the book and gets himself into a wild and somewhat absurd adventure. The chapters alternate between the adventure and telling the entire history of the 100 year old man’s life up to the point where he jumps out the window. The style of writing was adorable, but quite simple third person style with short sentences.

Alan’s life story delves with a lot of world history (partially fictional of course). As a person who has never quite been into politics and history, I learnt a lot of the political view points of past world leaders. I wish high school history was this exciting, or had elephants.

At first glance, The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly entices you with it’s beautiful golden cover and a leaflet that describes adventure. It appears to be a beautiful little fairy tale for children. However it is anything but that.

The book isn’t really geared towards children as there is plenty of violence and gore. In addition, the first half of the book I found really hard to get through because David, our hero, spends most of it mourning over the loss of his mother.

The book also ruins some classic fairytales by twisting them in morbid ways. There’s the Crooked Man who is a parody of Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood who had sex with a wolf and basically created the twisted “Loups”, a very obese Snow White and a few others.

This all just to teach a little boy that he should not hate his stepmother or be jealous of his step brother. It’s definitely a tale for adults who grew up on fairy tales and maybe explored the realms of Brother’s Grimm. It definitely wasn’t one of those you can’t put down type of books. Major plot holes were resolved in a quick manner towards the very end. In the end I was left unsatisfied.