THE LOST STORY

Three lost souls search for a missing woman.

When best friends Ralph “Rafe” Howell and Jeremy Cox were teenagers, they went missing in the woods of West Virginia for six months. Now, 15 years later, the two are estranged. Rafe lives in a cabin and spends his days hunting, painting, and being generally hermitic. Jeremy has an uncanny, almost supernatural ability to find lost people, and spends his time finding lost girls. Enter Emilie Wendell. Emilie’s adoptive mother recently died and, in her search to ease her loneliness, Emilie uploaded her DNA to a website that matched her with a half-sister she didn’t know existed. Here’s the catch: Emilie’s sister, Shannon Yates, went missing years ago in the same forest as Rafe and Jeremy. Emilie shows up to a TV interview Jeremy is doing and demands he help find her sister. Jeremy agrees and reveals a secret: Shannon, better known to him as Skya, is the queen of a magical land called Shanandoah. As it turns out, Jeremy and Rafe weren’t lost in the woods those many years ago but were spending their days galivanting around the secret magical kingdom whose entrance is in the forest. To return they need to enlist the help of Rafe, whose memories of Shanandoah and, more heartbreakingly, the love he held for Jeremy were erased when they left the magical world. After quite a bit of convincing, Rafe reluctantly agrees to help. What unfolds is an adventure filled with sword fights, romance, and gut-wrenching stories of the dark past that led the boys to the forest in the first place. Shaffer’s depictions of Emilie and Skya fall almost completely flat. That said, she makes up for it with the tender love between Jeremy and Rafe and the magical depiction of the world they once left behind.

Like all the best fairy tales: nostalgic with an undercurrent of darkness.