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The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer

Fantasy

The Lost Story

Repeat author

Meg Shaffer is back at Book of the Month – other BOTMs include The Wishing Game.

by Meg Shaffer

Excellent choice

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Quick take

Let this fairytale for adults filled with unicorns and hidden kingdoms enchant you with a fable about second chances.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Romance

    Romance

  • Illustrated icon, Multiple_Viewpoints

    Multiple viewpoints

  • Illustrated icon, LGBTQ_themes

    LGBTQ+ themes

  • Illustrated icon, Nonlinear_Timeline

    Nonlinear timeline

Synopsis

As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell went missing in a vast West Virginia state forest, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived.

Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Rafe is a reclusive artist who still bears scars inside and out but has no memory of what happened during those months. Meanwhile, Jeremy has become a famed missing persons’ investigator. With his uncanny abilities, he is the one person who can help vet tech Emilie Wendell find her sister, who vanished in the very same forest as Rafe and Jeremy.

Jeremy alone knows the fantastical truth about the disappearances, for while the rest of the world was searching for them, the two missing boys were in a magical realm filled with impossible beauty and terrible danger. He believes it is there that they will find Emilie’s sister. However, Jeremy has kept Rafe in the dark since their return for his own inscrutable reasons. But the time for burying secrets comes to an end as the quest for Emilie’s sister begins. The former lost boys must confront their shared past, no matter how traumatic the memories.

Alongside the headstrong Emilie, Rafe and Jeremy must return to the enchanted world they called home for six months—for only then can they get back everything and everyone they’ve lost.

Content warning

This book contains mentions of child abuse.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of The Lost Story.

The Lost Story

PROLOGUE

FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE OUR STORY BEGINS

Once upon a time in West Virginia, two boys went missing.

They’d been missing since May, vanished during an end-of-school field trip to Red Crow State Forest.

They were gone long enough that people had stopped referring to them as “missing,” which implied a temporary state of being, and now simply called them “lost.” You looked for missing children. You mourned lost ones.

By that November, the boys’ missing posters on the signboard at Red Crow had faded and wrinkled behind the protective plexiglass. When Maggie and Tom noticed the posters while looking for the trail map, they remembered that they’d forgotten all about the lost boys. Because that’s how it worked. First you were missing. Then you were lost.

Then you were forgotten.

Maggie hadn’t paid much attention to the story even when it was fresh news. That morning, standing at the signboard while Tom retied his boots, she really looked at the two boys for the first time. One was a blond who seemed incapable of smiling, the other a redhead wearing a shit-­eating grin. The class clown and his quiet sidekick, she assumed.

Ralph Stanley Howell, d.o.b. 6/15/92, 5'4, 118 lbs. Caucasian. Blond hair. Blue eyes.

Jeremy Andrew Cox, d.o.b. 5/28/92, 5'6, 129 lbs. Caucasian. Red hair. Hazel eyes.

“They never found those boys?” Tom asked.

“Nope. Probably never will.” Maggie was a nurse, and because she’d seen the worst, she knew to assume the worst. If the boys went missing in the Crow, odds were they’d died the first or second night. If they weren’t missing but kidnapped as some had theorized . . . they probably wished they were dead. She didn’t say that part out loud to Tom. It was only their fourth date, and she didn’t want to spoil the mood.

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Why I love it

As a child, I loved fantastical stories about magical worlds that reside adjacent to our own, and as an adult I’ve searched for stories that remind me of that feeling of wondrous discovery. Enter The Lost Story, an epic tale that will appeal to anyone who enjoys looking for magic in the ordinary.

Best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell vanished without a trace in the forest when they were teens and for six months no one was able to find them—until one day they magically reappeared. Neither boy could explain where they had been or what had happened to them. Flash forward fifteen years, the two friends have grown apart. Rafe is a recluse who has struggled since his homecoming. Jeremy on the other hand has made it his life’s work to find missing persons, and he is very good at it…almost too good. When a woman named Emilie enlists Jeremy’s help to uncover what happened to her long-lost sister who disappeared in the same forest as Jeremy and Rafe, the two friends will have to work together and revisit their past in order to unravel the mysterious disappearance.

The Lost Story is a whimsical book that captured me from the very first page. I’m sure you will be just as enchanted as I was by the book’s beautiful themes surrounding friendship, love, and bravery, which made this one of the most heartwarming books I’ve read this year.

Other books by Meg Shaffer

Member ratings (9,080)

Repeat authors
The Bodyguard
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
House of Glass
Like Mother, Like Daughter
The Lost Story
The Night Swim
The Pairing
Beach Read
Hera
The God of the Woods
One-Star Romance
The Paradise Problem
We Are the Brennans
Daisy Jones & The Six
This Tender Land
The Silent Patient
The Four Winds
You Are Not Alone
One by One
Yours Truly
Invisible Girl
The Rules of Magic
Survive the Night
Troubles in Paradise
Home Before Dark
The Lost Apothecary
Things You Save in a Fire
Real Americans
The Wishing Game
One Day in December
The Great Alone
People We Meet on Vacation
The Reckless Oath We Made
Lock Every Door
The Family Upstairs
Long Bright River
Infinite Country
Part of Your World
Recursion
The Half Moon
A Ladder to the Sky
The Sun Down Motel
The Mothers
The Vanishing Half
Memorial
The Shadows
Immortal Longings
Just for the Summer
The Connellys of County Down
The Knockout Queen
Happy & You Know It
Ask Again, Yes
Practical Magic
Lot
The Woman in Cabin 10
Dark Matter
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Final Girls
Hello Stranger
The Heart’s Invisible Furies
The Wife Between Us
The Broken Girls
In a Holidaze
The Kiss Quotient
The Last Time I Lied
Gods of Jade and Shadow
A Million Junes
The Bride Test
Darling Girls
The Turn of the Key
The Last Word
Dark Corners
Foul Lady Fortune
Evil Eye
The Soulmate
Repeat authors
View all
The Bodyguard
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
House of Glass
Like Mother, Like Daughter
The Lost Story
The Night Swim
The Pairing
Beach Read
Hera
The God of the Woods
One-Star Romance
The Paradise Problem
We Are the Brennans
Daisy Jones & The Six
This Tender Land
The Silent Patient
The Four Winds
You Are Not Alone
One by One
Yours Truly
Invisible Girl
The Rules of Magic
Survive the Night
Troubles in Paradise
Home Before Dark
The Lost Apothecary
Things You Save in a Fire
Real Americans
The Wishing Game
One Day in December
The Great Alone
People We Meet on Vacation
The Reckless Oath We Made
Lock Every Door
The Family Upstairs
Long Bright River
Infinite Country
Part of Your World
Recursion
The Half Moon
A Ladder to the Sky
The Sun Down Motel
The Mothers
The Vanishing Half
Memorial
The Shadows
Immortal Longings
Just for the Summer
The Connellys of County Down
The Knockout Queen
Happy & You Know It
Ask Again, Yes
Practical Magic
Lot
The Woman in Cabin 10
Dark Matter
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Final Girls
Hello Stranger
The Heart’s Invisible Furies
The Wife Between Us
The Broken Girls
In a Holidaze
The Kiss Quotient
The Last Time I Lied
Gods of Jade and Shadow
A Million Junes
The Bride Test
Darling Girls
The Turn of the Key
The Last Word
Dark Corners
Foul Lady Fortune
Evil Eye
The Soulmate