Book Review | LOST AND FOUND by Orson Scott Card

September 10, 2019,
Blackstone Publishing

Master storyteller Orson Scott Card delivers a touching and funny, compelling and smart novel about growing up, harnessing your potential, and finding your place in the world, no matter how old you are. - Goodreads

Orson Scott Card is a staple name in the Science Fiction and Fantasy arena. He is a diverse writer who captured both the adult and younger audiences.

I’m not here to review OSC as a writer. I’m stating all this because he is more than justified in writing LOST AND FOUND. I understand that it’s not an Ender’s book –no space battles, no aliens. And I totally get why he low-keyed the characters as micropots (people with micropowers). He literally dragged us away from admiring superheroes into looking deeper at the most probable, odds-on, overlooked human gifts.

Ezekiel had been ostracized as a thief since grade school because of his gift to recognize lost things and the compulsion to return them to the owners without a credible reason. And he has a standing mistrust of the Police Force after his many heated brushes with them. But his trudge on anti-social life was halted when Beth decided to walk with him to and from school every day and when a desperate (but broad-minded) detective asked his help to find a missing girl.

“It means that I trust you and you can trust me. It means that if something goes wrong for you I help as much as I can. It means that if you’re not where you’re expected, I look for you. It means that if good stuff happens I’m happy for you. It means that no matter what you say to me I still care about you. It means that when nobody else will tell you shit that you have to know, even if you’ll hate hearing it, I’m the one to say it."

I love the snarky dialogues Card employed. It helps in many ways to soften the hard subjects of the story (kidnapping, white slavery, death, etc.) And the pacing of the story was apposite, it enables to both pad out the characters and ties concepts together. The whole book is replete of wisdom in understanding family, people, and what works from what doesn’t. It simply says that everybody may look ordinary or nonspecial until they are not. The last 15% of the book sort of slowed down for me (maybe there’s a sequel in the works) and there are some descriptive terms I may not agree with, but overall this book is legitimately remarkable.

Book details:

Title: Lost and Found

Author: Orson Scott Card

Publication: September 10, 2019, by Blackstone Publishing

Genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy

Rating: ★★★★

*Thank you, Blackstone and Edelweiss for the DRC in exchange for this unbiased review.