Forgotten Things

One of my favorite parts of the novel is the relationship between Adam and his grandfather. Like his grandfather, Adam is open to the things that flit about the corners of our vision, the things that most adults have cast aside as fanciful notions of childhood. These are the things that both fascinate him and scare him, the shadows that move in the night, the shadows that move through the trees. The story is embued with old magic, woven through the lives of the characters in so many unexpected ways. I apprecciate the way the ideas and concepts of old magic are presented in this novel.

Forgotten Things

It isn't the more modern representations of magic that I am used to in young adult and children's fiction, but magic that is older, more nature-based It doesn't show Disneyfied faeries, but those that are mischievious, even mean. It celebrates the relationships between humantiy and nature and how it can be both bad and good. It is a beautiful story with lessons to be learned. Aug 03, Kyrja Kyrja rated it it was amazing. Take your time reading this book.

This is not an action-packed thriller to skim through, rushing through the pages to find out what happens. This is a tale to enjoy slowly. To meander through, and to indulge yourself in the richness of the experience.

Make his emotions your own, both the excitement and the terror. Feel the wonderment of the hidden world and its mysterious, concealed population all around you as you patiently wait for the Take your time reading this book. Feel the wonderment of the hidden world and its mysterious, concealed population all around you as you patiently wait for the story, and its lore, to be revealed.

Adam meets his grandfather for the first time when he and his parents are forced to move in with the old man after he has a stroke. Artfully written, this story will take you to a far-away time, while you stand firmly in the present. May you enjoy the journey and your own awareness of the fact that not all forgotten things should stay that way. Jan 06, Elizabeth Tyree rated it really liked it.

I even messaged the author at one point and asked him about his choice of voice and use of incredibly in-depth descriptive passage. There are several places that tell us the showing instead of showing us the setting did that sentence make sense? For more on this review see: Dec 11, Heavenlypeachgarden rated it it was amazing.

I liked this tale first when i started reading it. It is magical and ethereal with a wonderful attention to detail. The imagery makes the magic and nature come alive. My favourite character is Granpa i like the way he speaks and how his room is described. Apr 26, Angela Isaac rated it really liked it. I felt as if I was pixie-led into this book. The reader, along with the main character Adam, is lead into the woodland world of the fae. The writing is lyrical, as full of life as the woods, and captures the sense of magic and wonder, and also the danger and mystery.

Through young Adam's eyes we see, feel, taste, smell and hear the woods, and glimpse the creatures which inhabit them. The voice of each character is distinct, yet filtered through the young boy's perspective. We see them as he does I felt as if I was pixie-led into this book. We see them as he does, but also the reality from the older Adam recalling events. Narrative from his older self foregrounds more sinister events to come. This novel was both enchanting, and disturbing with a macabre twist. The first person past tense is descriptive.

Reading the first half of this book is an immersive experience, rather like a pathworking into the woods. Then, as events unravel, we are pulled back into the real or rather the 'mundane' world to see the repercussions of when our human world and the Faery's realm collide. While the ending perfectly rounds off the story,with Adam understandably changed by his experiences, it left me with a sense of melancholy. Like faeries, this story is filled with magic and wonder, but also has a darker side.

Jul 04, Mireille Prusak rated it really liked it Shelves: This book desperately needed a good copy-editor, which is usually one of my pet peeves. The author's unusual writing style also took some getting used to, but as it went on, the odd cadence of the writing really enhanced the magic of the story. Also, I will forgive almost anything for a great story, and this novel was above all else a celebration of storytelling.

Pure magic, start to finish. Anna Kilcooley rated it it was ok Aug 27, Patricia rated it liked it Jul 06, Black rated it it was amazing Aug 26, This was bad news for a team of British scientists who took a three year journey to the South Pole , and packed nothing but biscuits, canned fat, cocoa, butter and sugar, which was supplemented by their horses when the starving time came.

Despite the fact that it was almost years after the cure for scurvy was discovered by one of their own damned countrymen, they were plum baffled when everyone got scurvy. Which is why the British Navy switched the ration from lemons to limes in the early 19th century; limes were plentiful within the empire. Unfortunately, they're not as rich in vitamin C, and no one made the link between vitamin C deficiency and scurvy until --almost two hundred damned years after we first figured out lemons helped.

And not only were the limes not as chock full of anti-scurvy nectar, but the navy didn't serve it fresh, they served it as juice. In the process of juicing, they got rid of a good deal of the vitamin C. It turns out there's a downside to living on boats in the middle of nowhere for months at a time. At the same time, better naval technology shortened voyages, so scurvy didn't have the chance to manifest itself as it used to. So everyone thought limes were doing the trick, but they weren't.

And, as if there weren't already Three's Company level misunderstandings, the dominant theory was that rotten meat, not lack of vitamin C, caused scurvy. And all of these things combined in one horrific expedition to the Antarctic.

Book Review: Forgotten Things

It wasn't until 20 years later that people actually used something called "science" and "evidence" to nail down the actual cure for scurvy. Which, it turns out, was the same cure discovered a couple of centuries before. Claudius Galenus called "Galen" by his peers was the greatest surgeon in the world back in the second century AD, which is a little like saying he was the "classiest stripper in Atlantic City. And Galen himself was a huge advocate of bloodletting, and was the first doctor to prescribe " bleeding it out " as a perfectly reasonable way to cure headaches.

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Just a few more pints and your dandruff will be gone forever! G was also the first guy who popularized ligature as a method of stopping uncontrollable bleeding. Ligature, for those of you who aren't in the medical know, is tying up a bleeding artery, vein or pee valve. Before Galen there was only one treatment for deadly bleeding: Sounds all right, unless you know that "cauterize" is Latin for "burn it shut.

Also known as "arson on your arteries. As the chief surgeon for wounded gladiators in Pergamus, Turkey, Galen was the first to stop a hemorrhage by tying the injured vessel closed. And he got so good at zipping fools up that the mortality rate of his charges was next to nothing , which rightfully made him famous. His technique revolutionized medicine By the Middle Ages, no one was doing the ligature thing.

Not only was cauterizing the only way to deal with bleeding valves, Europeans decided to one-up the barbarism by full-on pouring boiling tar on the injury rather than using a hot iron. Well, lots of brilliant stuff was forgotten during the Dark Ages, like the shape of the Earth and how to bathe.

In Medieval Europe, touching a sick person was a no-no--you'd probably feel the same way if 60 percent of the people in your universe died of the plague.

So instead of tying an injured artery closed, the surgeon just burned it shut with a long metal rod. Meanwhile, the Islamic world actually embraced Galen's treatises , and kept his immense legacy alive while the Western world got progressively stupider. But they had their own problem: Getting all up inside a sickie's veins wasn't kosher , or whatever the Islamic word for kosher is, and the Muslim world that loved so much of Galen's other teachings let this one little remedy go the way of the pulled pork sandwich.

It wasn't until that a French surgeon re-popularized Galen's idea about ligature and people started getting their tie on again--a whole lot of dead patients and an ocean of spilled blood later. How about if it was approximately 2, miles long? Such a thing existed in India once upon a time, and it was probably big enough to be seen from space. Why would somebody bother to plant a hedge that ridiculously huge? Well, salt used to rule the world.

It was so valuable it was often used as currency, and for centuries, despots who wanted to grab a country by the balls only needed to control its access to salt. The British East India Company, for instance, brutalized India for decades with a crippling salt tax. There was only one problem: Salt was totally accessible to anyone willing to travel to either coast during the summer.

Because the salt just sat there in the evaporated ocean bed , begging to get mined, boiled and tossed on your giant mall pretzels. So the British East India Company came up with an evil-genius-caliber solution to prevent salt smuggling: They hired demonic gardeners to raise a living, impenetrable wall of thorns that became known as the Great Hedge of India. The Great Hedge was immense: I was pleased that Mullaney-Westwood paid no attention to the modern Kindle-fuelled notion that books ought to resemble a literary equivalent of fast-food, to be thoughtlessly digested in a hurry.

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Forgotten Things matches classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry in setting a pace which reflects the manner in which a child experiences the passing of time. Another element of the story which strengthens the credibility of the juvenile point of view is the impact which a simple conversation, experience or object can have on a young mind at times, something adults tend to be more immune to, often blind to the weird and wonderful offered by life.

By happy coincidence or serendipity this is the first Shakespeare play I ever saw performed. It is for this reason that Oberon and Titania make a guest appearance in my Wyrde Woods series which also feature a Puck. Needless to add perhaps, but I cheered loudly when the play made an entrance in Forgotten Things and I felt very much at one with Adam at that moment, fully understanding his fascination.

One immediate result of this is that Mullaney-Westwood manages to transcend the usual description of a wood as a cartoonish place with brown tree trunks and green foliage. Instead he depicts woodlands in their full diversity, capturing the wide variety of colour, touch, smell, sound and mood which is to be found in the British countryside. It is clear that the author loves and understands this environment well and he manages to transfer his enthusiasm eloquently.

That authenticity also means that the secret world of the Fae, partially revealed to Adam, is presented to the reader in a most credible fashion, all the more so because these are not the scantily dressed cutified fairies romanticised by the Victorians and robbed of their traditional menace by Disney. Instead the Fae are the real deal; whimsical, dangerous, playful and easily offended.

Book Review: Forgotten Things | HobbyLark

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