Review | The Lost Path by Amélie Fléchais

Adventure stories for children starring children will never go out of style. From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to The Neverending Story to Goonies, there’s a great thrill in young ones being able to see themselves as the protagonists in exciting situations. The Lost Path by Amélie Fléchais is one such tale in which a trio of boys find themselves in the thick of a secret world of strange and wondrous creatures, but how does it measure up to some of the classics?

With some writing help by Jonathan Garnier, The Lost Path is written and illustrated by Fléchais. The book opens with a fairy tale of an older couple whose spirits are trapped by the forest before it quickly transitions to boys playing a scavenger hunt in the forest. They get lost and as the night grows darker, they find their situation growing stranger as they move deeper into the forest.

The story itself feels heavily influenced by Where the Wild Things Are, a notion that is supported by the Maurice Sendak quote that proceeds the book. The boys interact with the creatures, not understanding the world that they’ve arrived in, and with no understanding of the dangers they face. In addition to this, I find a lot of influence from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the way the plot revolves around the forest guardian and the quest for the crown. Both of these are ideal stories to draw inspiration from for a children’s book of these sorts as they are seminal classics, but I don’t think Fléchais really handled the interpretation of the themes properly.

The problem with the story is that the boys don’t do anything. They’re simply reacting to everything that happens around them. They don’t learn any lessons, they don’t affect the world in any way. Their only purpose is to witness the events and they, and by extension the reader, don’t get the chance to see anything through to the conclusion. That’s one of the major shortcomings of the book, in that the story doesn’t really matter. (We don’t even discover the outcome of the scavenger hunt.)

One of the things that turned me off most about The Lost Path was its abrupt ending. While the kids’ journey is an interesting one, the characters they meet are far more intriguing, but Fléchais never dives into any of them. I wanted to learn more about the fox and his supersonic bike, or the moose and how he got the bowler hat, or even what the deal was with the hat. Unfortunately, all of these characters are just incidental, there to give the boys a sense of wonder. Since the story is told from the perspective of the boys, once they are out of the woods, we lose all connection to these strange and wondrous creatures. Their tales are never finished and that’s just a shame.

The book’s art is breathtaking. The illustrations by Fléchais are magnificent and really bring her world and characters to life. Her style suits the creatures she’s created and I love the spin she gives the look of the humans. Each of the boys is unique and easily decipherable at a glance. I also loved the sparse use of color in the book. Most of the pages are black and white, rendered in great detail, but every so often readers are treated to a page of full, vibrant color, which makes the scene more dramatic when juxtaposed against the monochrome panels.

The art also does a great job of slowing down the reader. The Lost Path has a very fast paced story, with so much happening in so few pages that it’s easy to breeze through the whole thing, but the highly detailed art forced me to pause and pour over the details in the minutiae on page, which helped me to digest the story better.

The Lost Path is beautiful visually but doesn’t pack much originality. I would have preferred to spend more time with the Guardian, learning about her kingdom, or some of the animals in the forest. It was slightly disappointing that Fléchais gleaned over all of these interesting situations and themes, instead focusing on the boys finding their way home. I understand her decision, though, as this story felt aimed for children. All in all, it’s a good story for those who are interested in child adventure stories but doesn’t offer much depth.

Grade: B-