Book review: Magical read The Land of Lost Things is a story of hope

The reader needs to suspend disbelief, just as we did as children listening to fairy tales read to us by adults.

Author John Connolly. Picture: Mark Condren/PA.

Ceres is a single mother whose daughter Phoebe has been knocked down by a car and is in a coma, unresponsive in hospital. All she can do for her beloved daughter is sit by her bed and read aloud to her the fairy stories they both love.

After months of hoping her daughter will wake, Ceres is desperate, miserable, thinking about giving up, ending her life. She’s going through a dark night of the soul when she comes upon an old house in the hospital grounds. It draws Ceres and she enters, where she is transported into an alternative reality, to a place called Elsewhere. She ages backwards to 16, which she sometimes finds frustrating on her journey, simultaneously having adult understanding but forced to cope with teenage feelings.