Previously Published Review: The Lost Children, Carolyn Cohagen

I want to begin by saying that I'm fairly sure this book suffered from 'first book syndrome,' characterized by what I like to call the "everything and the kitchen sink" school of plotting.

I almost could see the checklist getting ticked off.
Cold and humorless (and therefore mysterious) father figure? Check.
Timid but secretly spunky heroine? Check.
Space-time convolutions? Check.
Mean caretaker women/witch characters? Check.
Creepy children? Doublecheck.
Useless adults? Triplecheck.

That established, it was a decent first attempt, and a fun read. I'm currently trying to not think too closely about the ending, which, like all space-time-convolution stories, doesn't really hold up well when thought about closely. There are also some characterization choices right at the end that don't quite match the characters as we have come to know them through the book. (Slightly more irritating, those character choices, while useful to the angst of the heroine throughout the tale, could have been exised and replaced with very little difficulty, making it all the more jarring to encounter.)

Basic idea: Josephine is a half-orphan, and her father is so distant that she may as well be a real one. She gets new gloves once a week, but can't remember what his voice sounds like. One day, a small boy appears, and whisks her off to a place where children are endangered by magical beasts, and all the adults are powerless to help them. Josephine, Fargus (the little boy she meets), and their friend Ida all quest through this new world to salvage what they can of their own families, and those of the other lost children.

There are some gruesome stories of families murdered or dragged off while the child is hiding and watching, and the villain is quite suprisingly evil. Maybe not a good choice for bedtime stories.
The monsters are fairly terrifying of themselves, but even worse, they are associated with burying children alive in deep holes, and then 'electrocuting' their energy out of them. The burying parts and the electrocution parts are fairly detailed, and pretty creepy.
Only three of the adults in the whole story redeem themselves in any way from passively letting their children be taken into slavery to secure their own continued safety. This is blatantly discussed. Kids with issues about abandonment or separation anxiety may not deal well with this.

Everything ends up extremely neat and pat, with amazing rescues and nice twists of fate for the baddies, but oddly enough, the nice neat "and they all lived happily ever after" for the supporting cast is so cheery and quickly brushed over that it's easily overlooked, while the main characters (we learn at the end) actually have horrible lives, and we don't even find out all the details thereof.

The overall feel is very old-school Grimms fairy tales (the unexpurgated ones) where simply being good and trying to do right doesn't actually mean that everything comes out ok in the end. If you or your kid want a fairy-story with a traditional happily-ever-after ending, you may want to hold off on this one.