Clichéd plot lines centered around rich, intellectually superior teenage boys with tragedy in their pasts, secrets to uncover and villains to battle are all the rage nowadays. The Lost Worlds follows this stereotypical young-adult-novel format with no deviation whatsoever.
Half-paralyzed Callum Challenger lives a life surrounded by multiple computer screens in South London, looking for creatures that have been claimed extinct over thousands of years ago. He believes that the discovery, and more specifically, their DNA, will help him walk again. A blurry photo of a so called yeti on the internet sparks his interest.
That's when he decides that an expedition must be sent. The most unlikely of peope are thrust into these circumstances, along with a trusted robot. All goes according to plan, until a corporate company sniffs them out, and make it a point to stop the expedition and Callum Challenger forever.
Fishing out photos of "supernatural" creatures on the internet is an everyday thing. Normal peope would laugh it off, maybe share it as a text. Callum Challenger chose to send an expedition team to a remote mountain area, spend thousands of dollars on a robot and pray it was a lucky guess. Along the way, he also made enemies with a group of powerful corporates and put his own partially-paralyzed life in danger.
It's terribly illogical. Yet, the prose is brilliantly persuasive. If it had been written by any other author, in any other manner, it would've been a laughing stock. Andrew Lane made all the difference. Despite the fact that there were some absolutely absurd concepts in the book such as "free-running" which would normally land you a broken spinal cord and a lifetime of horrendously expensive physiotherapy instead of a deal with black-market thieves, it's a novel that must be read. I'd describe the way this book was written as refreshing.
It's nice to have an author who occasionally indulges us all in wild flights of fantasy. This might be a clichéd novel, but it's a good one, which truly are rare gems to find.
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