Storytelling to the Rescue 
 I am not normally a fan of fantasy, but this beautiful piece of storytelling by John Connolly captured me in its first pages, held me spellbound through its travels into strange worlds, and brought me home in tears at the end. It owes an obvious debt to 
 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe 
 and others in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis, but it is written for older readers and has a darker message, Jungian rather than Christian. A young boy, David, slips through a gap between the his real world and that of his imagination, and finds himself in a nightmare country of perpetual twilight, where wolf armies prowl forests littered with human remains, and the aged king cowers in his castle, guarding a perhaps-worthless talisman, the Book of Lost Things. It is up to David, with the aid of various temporary guides who may or may not be trustworthy, to reach the castle and save the kingdom, finding in himself resources that he did not know he had. 
 But the book is far more than a mere children's story. Connolly takes all the time necessary to establish the real world first. David's love of books comes from his mother, and he reads to her in his turn as she is dying of cancer. He reacts badly when his father falls in love again, and gives him a baby step-brother. David retreats to his books, which now seem to develop minds of their own, talking to him in disturbing voices. All this is set in and around London at the beginning of the Blitz, and the transition into the make-believe world is handled magnificently, overlapping with the fiery crash of a German bomber. 
 The first few chapters in this other word may stagger a little from episode to episode before gathering their own momentum. But the episodes themselves are fascinating, grimmer-than-Grimm fairy-tales, just familiar enough to sink their claws into the subconscious, but unpredictable in their outcome and challenging David in unexpected ways. Myths they may be, but they reflect the psychological reality so well set up at the beginning, being the products of David's own jealousy and loss. He heals himself by conquering them, and comes to accept his loss. While David may be only on the edge of adulthood himself, the book imposes a fierce puberty, with references to matters not usually featured in children's stories, such as child molesters and same-sex lovers, and the even more terrible recognition of the potential for evil that we each carry inside us. 
 David's quest ends more suddenly than one might have expected (the last ninety pages turn out to be notes on the various myths used in the story), and Connolly returns us gracefully to the real world. Some of the events of the final chapter are predictable, but only some. It is one of the loveliest aspects of the book that even the happily-ever-after is tinged with sorrow; David's discovery of how to deal with loss does not mean that he will not experiences other losses in the future. But he has learned how to live in the spirit of epiphany, right down to that lovely final sentence that had me in helpless tears: 
 And in the darkness David closed his eyes, and all that was lost was found again.