The Book of Lost Things by Cynthia Voigt

As the electric door into the market swung open in front of me-this, I remember vividly-I thought: 'What would happen if nobody ever came back for those children?' 'For some reason, and I have no idea what that reason might have been, on that afternoon that car and those children caught my attention. I noticed that the children were waiting there. I myself had parked just down the row on the weekly grocery shopping trip, which happened every Friday on my way home from school. 'This story began-or was caused by-four children who had been left in the station wagon while the driver/adult-a parent? A babysitter-grandmother-aunt-neighbor?-went into the supermarket to shop. That was when I remembered the Kingdom, with its peasants and nobles, hunters and innkeepers, injustices, laws, superstitions-a whole complicated world, and I remembered Gwyn, too. I wondered about the condittorei, the mercenary soldiers who followed their bold captains, some of whom eventually became great nobles, ruling over wide landscapes, and ruling well, too, some of them.Įspecially I wondered about girls, what their lives were like, and especially what the life of a girl who didn't always go along quietly might be like. I wondered about the science of Alchemy, which was almost chemistry but also tried to work with magic, and about those wise women who cured people with herbal remedies. The wheel turns and our life goes on and in whatever chance says is the proper time, we drop off, disappear. I wondered about the wheel of fortune, the idea that there is a wheel on which each of us is fixed, at birth, by chance for all of our one life. For some reason, I kept thinking about that time, that city. (previously published as On Furtune's Wheel)Īfter telling Gwyn's story, I thought I was finished with the Kingdom, but some time later, I read a book about life in a city during the Renaissance era.

The Book of Lost Things by Cynthia Voigt