Something Old Yet New: Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire

Release Date: January 10, 2023
Publisher: Tordotcom Publishing
Series: Wayward Children #8
Genre: Fantasy

Description

A young girl discovers an infinite variety of worlds in this standalone tale in the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Wayward Children series from Seanan McGuire, Lost in the Moment and Found.

Welcome to the Shop Where the Lost Things Go.

If you ever lost a sock, you’ll find it here.
If you ever wondered about a favorite toy from childhood… it’s probably sitting on a shelf in the back.

And the headphones that you swore this time you’d keep safe? You guessed it….

Antoinette has lost her father. Metaphorically. He’s not in the Shop, and she’ll never see him again. But when Antsy finds herself lost (literally, this time), she discovers that however many doors open for her, leaving the Shop for good might not be as simple as it sounds.

And stepping through those doors exacts a price.

Lost in the Moment and Found tells us that childhood and innocence, once lost, can never be found.

My Thoughts

The threads of trauma and grief connect each of the stories in the Wayward Children series. Doors only open for children who need an escape or who have no reason to stay, and to get to that point a child must undergo experiences we hope no child should. Antsy is no different. (Heed the content warnings for “grooming and adult gaslighting,” but also know that the worst never happens, on the page or off.) The world she enters is designed to appeal to a child… and to frustrate a grown-up. The doors give children new lives at prices so high they cannot comprehend what they’ve paid it until it’s too late. There is no happily-ever-after, no playful Narnia or topsy-turvy Wonderland, only cold, hard reality wearing a sheepskin disguise. Antsy doesn’t deserve what happens to her in our world or the in-between world anymore than any other child deserves the terrible things life hurls at them. The question now is how to survive…

Read the rest of my review at Tor.com.

Check out my compendium of every portal world mentioned in the series through book 3 as well as my review of the first three books over at Tor.com.

Buy at bookshop.org (affiliate link)