Lost Boy

by Linda Newbery

Overview

New house, new school, new friends–but Matt Lanchester knows it won’t all be that easy when he moves to the town of Hay-on-Wye. Almost as soon as he arrives, he is drawn into a mystery when he sees a roadside memorial marked by a little wooden cross with the initials M.L. carved into it. His initials! Then he meets Robbo and Tig and Old Wil Jones and his wife, Gwynnie. There’s history here and a well-kept village secret–and Matt is desperate to find out more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375849336
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	03/11/2008
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	265 KB
Age Range:	9 - 12 Years

About the Author

Linda Newbery, winner of the prestigious Costa Award for Children’s Literature, effortlessly mixes the old with the new, the past with the present, tragedy with triumph in this hauntingly beautiful novel.
Linda Newbery is the acclaimed author of At the Firefly Gate, Sisterland, The Shell House, and Set in Stone, winner of the Costa Award for children’s literature. She lives in Northamptonshire with her husband and three cats.

Editorial Reviews

Matt Lanchester, newly transplanted to a small Welsh town, is out biking when he imagines a near-collision with a car, only to land next to a roadside memorial to a boy with his own initials. Matt begins to experience the dead boy's ghostly presence as he confronts several puzzles involving the missing son of a local farmer, a turn-of-the-century legend of a lost boy named Tommy Jones and the circumstances surrounding the vehicular death of Martin Lloyd. Newbery (Set in Stone) seamlessly interleaves Tommy Jones's tale among the larger narrative's own levels of suspense-chiefly, whether Matt will succumb to the bullying of the town punks, who claim to want revenge for Martin's death, before he figures out the connections among the three lost boys. With its imaginative melding of present-day concerns, good storytelling, lush descriptions of the landscape and even a faithful dog, this novel will ensnare readers. Ages 8-12. (Mar.)

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Publishers Weekly

Gr 5-7- Riding his bike through the Welsh countryside, 13-year-old Matt Lancaster is hit by a Land Rover-or is he? He is unhurt, his bike is unmarked, and there is no sight or sound of the vehicle. Moreover, the spot where it happens was the site of a similar accident years before, in which 13-year-old Martin Lloyd was killed. New to the town of Hay-on-Wye, where his parents have opened a bookstore, Matt finds himself reluctantly spending time with Tig and Robbo, school bullies who have targeted an old man for sinister mischief, convincing Matt that Wil was Martin's murderer. When Wil brings in a box of books to sell, he inadvertently includes a manuscript (reproduced in its entirety within the novel) which tells the story of another death-that of five-year-old Tommy Jones-lost in the hills many years before. Was Tommy Wil's son, or is Owen, to whom many of the books are inscribed? Gradually, and with the help of three new friends, Matt sorts everything out, but continues to have nightmares, feeling the presence of Martin Lloyd, and sensing that there is something that Martin wants him to do. Readers will empathize with Matt's conflict between needing to belong and doing the right thing, and will enjoy this engrossing mystery with a touch of the supernatural.-Marie Orlando, Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY

Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Matt Lanchester, biking on a country road near his new home in Wales, believes that he was nearly killed after he experiences a supernatural accident with a phantom speeding car. This incident is identical to the real accident that left a boy dead on the same spot years before. Matt's encounter with a crude shrine that bears the victim's initials-the same as Matt's-leads to further revelations: He feels a mystical connection between the victim, Martin Lloyd, and himself; and it seems as if Martin wants Matt to learn the truth about his death. There are several "lost boys" here-Martin, the roadside casualty, and a child who succumbed after losing his way on a mountaintop a century ago and whose death and his dog's valiant efforts to find him have become the stuff of local legend. Matt's lost, too: He's trying to discover truths about the present by making sense of the past. He's also navigating friendships, including a tenuous one with a pair of toughs who've wrongly accused an elderly, mentally confused townsman of being Martin's killer. The author fairly successfully interweaves contemporary events with the past and reality with the mystical to frame a mildly engaging story. (Fiction. 10-13)

Kirkus Reviews

Starred review, Publishers Weekly, March 31, 2008:
"With its imaginative melding of present-day concerns, good storytelling, lush descriptions of the landscape and even a faithful dog, this novel will ensnare readers.”

From the Hardcover edition.

From the Publisher