New Book Alert: Lost Boy by Rawiri James; Suspenseful and Dramatic YA Novel Marred by Unnecessary Supernatural Subplot

New Book Alert: Lost Boy by Rawiri James; Suspenseful and Dramatic YA Novel Marred by Unnecessary Supernatural Subplot


By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews


Spoilers: Sometimes a book works when you combine several genres. You are reading about cowboys then all of a sudden, oops, a dragon appears! A couple goes out on a date, then suddenly he sprouts fangs and that chick lit romance you are reading suddenly heads towards Dark Fantasy Land.

Then there are times when crossing genres doesn't work so well when one half of the genre so overwhelms the course of the book, that the other genre becomes intrusive and almost unnecessary.

The latter situation is the issue with Lost Boy by Rawiri James. This book is an attempt to combine a coming of age YA and suspense novel with a science fiction/fantasy along the lines of X-Men. That isn't a bad premise in and of itself. The central idea is intriguing and the various aspects could work together. But in this case, they don't.


Mike DeVelli Jr.’s life seems to spiral out of control lately. His mother has died and both he and his father are having trouble coping with the loss. Mike Sr. retreats into alcohol while Mike Jr. becomes obsessed with constantly working out and eating very little. Mike Jr. alienates both his best friend, Joey, and his girlfriend, Nicole, to find solace through clubbing with school bad girl, Priyanka. Things go from bad to really bad when Priyanka goes missing and Mike is considered a suspect.


All of that would work as a coherent plot, but James also adds that Mike finds a newspaper article from another country that implies that he may be adopted. He also shares memories that he never had before and suddenly discovers that he has the ability to control and manipulate water.


Lost Boy has enough great things going for it that is a shame to take it apart but take it apart we must. The Coming of Age and suspense angles work so well that when the book veers towards the sci-fi and superhero, those aspects become jarring and take the Reader out of the rest of the book.


This book is filled with many different subjects: parental death, alcoholism, drug addiction, eating disorders (with a male character no less), interracial dating, pedophilia, child molestation, false accusations against a teacher, and child abduction. Anyone of these could just as easily remained the main focus of the book. Even Mike Jr. discovering that he was adopted could lead to an interesting subplot about what it's like to be a displaced orphaned child from an impoverished war-torn country.


However, the science fiction aspects get introduced in the middle of the book almost too late for it to be any importance to the rest of the story. Then, it takes the lion's share of the climax so what begins as a realistic kidnapping becomes a mano-y-mano match between a superhero and supervillain.


If maybe the superhero plot had been introduced earlier or became instrumental to the rest of the book (perhaps Mike's mother could have been killed by a former adversary instead of heart failure), the book may have succeeded. But there is just too much going on with too many plots that don't work together.


Lost Boy ends with the promise of a sequel. Here's hoping that there will be a better handle of combining the real and the unreal.