Waking Up Lost – A Mystical Fantasy Adventure
(The Adirondack Spirit Series)
By David Fitz-Gerald
Traveling without warning. Nights lost to supernatural journeys. Is one young man fated to wander far from safety?
New York State, 1833. Noah Munch longs to fit in. Living with a mother who communes with ghosts and a brother with a knack for heroics, the seventeen-year-old wishes he were fearless enough to discover an extraordinary purpose of his own. But when he mysteriously awakens in the bedroom of the two beautiful daughters of the meanest man in town, he realizes his odd sleepwalking ability could potentially be deadly.
Convinced that leaving civilization is the only way to keep himself and others safe, Noah pursues his dream of becoming a mountain man and slips away into the primeval woods. But after a strong summer storm devastates his camp, the troubled lad finds his mystical wanderings have only just begun.
Can Noah find his place before he’s destroyed by a ruthless world?
Waking Up Lost is the immersive fourth book in the Adirondack Spirit Series of historical fiction. If you like coming-of-age adventures, magical realism, and stories of life on the American frontier, then you’ll love David Fitz-Gerald’s compelling chronicle.
Buy Waking Up Lost to map out destiny today!
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MY THOUGHTS
Noah Munch is an outsider in his own home. His mother can talk to ghosts and help them move on from this world, and his brother, Moses, can move around at incredible speed, which is useful when saving things from falling or leaving situations quickly. Noah, however, has no special gift. And on top of that, the village shuns him because he is half Indian and, unlike Moses, he looks it.
One night, Noah goes to bed as he always does, a normal person in his normal life, but instead of waking up in bed, he wakes up far away, by a small building in the woods, where his father lived before meeting his mother. Beginning the slow trudge back home, Noah is left wondering – how did he end up so far away from home, and is it likely to happen again?
Having read two other books by this author, I was excited to get back into this world, especially so when I realised this was about Mehitable’s (from She Sees Ghosts) son. Noah was a character I was incredibly excited to get to know, and this book did not disappoint. Noah is living a life where he can’t quite figure out who he is, or where he belongs. He doesn’t have friends around the village like Moses does, but rather, he has enemies. There are those who would do anything to see Noah leave the village, and make Noah’s life a misery while he remains.
There is a pull towards Noah’s father’s house, in the woods, and when Noah wakes up somewhere else again, somewhere that would mean he might find himself dead if he was caught, he packs up his things and heads out to the wickiup to live in solitude. Although he has grown up a sheep farmer, Noah quickly figures out how to survive in the wild, and he starts to prepare for the winter. Reading about how Noah creates his caches, and how he works to fill them, creating a new life for himself in the footsteps of his father, was something I greatly enjoyed. There is no trying to fit in, no working to make people like him, just being himself and surviving.
Not all the situations Noah finds himself in are as peaceful as living like his father did, though. Noah’s ‘gift’ isn’t stopped when he ties himself to his bed at night, nor when he finally seems to have some stability in his life. His life grows steadily more dangerous until he isn’t afraid of waking up lost, but of waking up found by people he doesn’t know, forced into living a life he is unfamiliar with, with no escape in sight, and no clear way home. When Noah finds himself on the deck of a boat, he knows this time will be different than when he woke up in the woods, because there are people keeping him here, he can’t just get up and find his way home. Noah’s time along the canal is a period of his life that is incredibly traumatic. The way of life upon the particular boat Noah finds himself on isn’t one of teamwork, but of a Captain who deals in discipline and consequences, and when those consequences more often than not mean being thrown overboard to drown, Noah must try his best to stay in line and not draw attention to himself.
While there are several characters in this book who are also in She Sees Ghosts, such as Mehitable, Polly, Reuben and Moses, this is not a book about Mehitable’s generation, and with a book about a different generation comes a whole new cast of characters. And while it may bring people who cause Noah harm, it also brings those who do not. Arminda is the girl that draws Noah’s eye whenever she is close, although it appears to Noah that such an attachment is one-sided, and his crush is simply that – a crush, on a girl who does not even see him. Dorcas, however, is almost the opposite. She is an incredibly outgoing girl, who places herself in Noah’s life and refuses to leave. And while Dorcas clearly feels very strongly about Noah, and Noah cannot say that he feels nothing for her, he always has the thought of Arminda in the back of his mind. What is a book without a bit of relationship trouble?
David Fitz-Gerald is an author whose books I greatly enjoy reading, and this book was no exception. There is adventure, danger, intrigue and mystery, ghosts and supernatural powers – there is something for everyone in this book. Every word seems to have been carefully chosen and the result is a well-crafted novel that I absolutely adored reading. I cannot wait to get my hands on anything else this author has written!
Read my reviews of She Sees Ghosts and The Curse of Conchobar!
