This review does contain spoilers

I’ve long been a big fan of the Wayward Children books, and think that most of them, including this one, make for a great jumping-on point. However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t provide something of an introduction to the world and how it works before reviewing the book itself, so I’ll promise to keep it short. The books focus on teens returning from Doors to other worlds to our own more mundane world and on them struggling to adapt back in our world, or finding their Door back to whatever land they were first spirited away to. The Doors are always inscribed with the message “Be Sure,” and are catered to the child’s personalities or needs. Think isekai, or portal fantasy and you can’t go far wrong. These realms beyond the Doors can be anything from realms of chaos, order, to worlds of horror, goblin markets, lands made of candy and many more besides. The fulcrum of the books is Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, a boarding school for returning protagonists that acts as a retreat from the world and a salve for those who can’t return to the worlds beyond the Doors; think Xavier’s School for Gifted Mutants but for portal fantasy characters. 

The book starts with Antsy and her mother losing the most important thing to her, her dad. Antsy’s mum seeks to make them a family unit again with the introduction of her new partner, Tyler, little suspecting that she’s introduced a monster over the bed. Antsy’s step-father is a chronic gaslighter, paedophile, predator and abuser, and acts as the catalyst that causes Antsy to run and find her Door.

“She didn’t like Tyler, not one bit, but now she felt like she understood why, and understanding a thing was the first step to conquering it.”

Antsy thinks that her mother would never believe her, and so she runs. To be fair to her, her trust in her mother has been all but eroded by all of the small lies that her mother has accepted from Tyler. It’s worth noting that Antsy is only nine years old, so it’s only with the benefit of time that she questions her own logic and thinks that her mother may have believed her.

Antsy finds herself running into a junkshop named Anthony & Sons, Trinkets and Treasures ran by a talking magpie called Hudson and an old woman called Vineta. To “pay her way” Antsy is made an employee of the shop, and finds that it acts as a lost and found, where customers enter through the Doors to find lost items or pets. Antsy is also employed in using the Doors to buy different products and foods from many fantastic lands, including a market of cat people.

In a shop, everything has a price. Similarly in the best portrayals of magic, magic also has a price, such as blood sacrifices or losing something important or some vital part of yourself; the more powerful the magic, the greater the price. Just when you think that Antsy has no more that she can lose, you find yourself proved wrong. 

Antsy discovers a note by her bedside that says “Nothing comes free; ask them what it costs you.” With further investigation she discovers a diary from the first occupant of the shop, Elodina, and discovers the horror the price of hospitality and sanctuary that she has been unwittingly paying.

 The price of Antsy using the Doors is time. Every time she uses the Doors she loses two days of her lifespan and ages. Not much in the grand scheme of things, but cumulatively she grows from being nine years old to being in her teens. So not only has she lost her innocence in her old life, when her step father tried blackmailing her into sleeping with him, but her childhood was literally sacrificed in a place in which she sought escape. Both of these places should have been sanctuaries, but instead ended up being sacrifices to something she couldn’t afford to lose and she could never get back.

Antsy finally finds her Door back to Earth, but we don’t know how much time has passed since this has occurred. She also finds that she has the power to find things and reunite items and people where they’re meant to be. At first this leads her to the front of her mother’s house.

There’s a heartbreaking reunion with her mother in which she sees that she is like her missing daughter, but because of the age difference discounts the fact that it’s actually her daughter and merely a passing resemblance. Her mother reveals that when Antsy went missing there was a full police investigation and they found pictures of child porn on Tyler’s computer, and that her sister, who was only a baby when she ran away, only knows her from pictures. There’s a sense that Antsy can go back to being her daughter and passing off as herself with enough time, maybe in her mid twenties they can both have the reunion both of them crave, but for now it is not to be.

Lastly, her powers bring her almost inevitably to the gates of Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children, so she has found a new home, at least for a time.

The implications of Antsy’s power of finding lost things and returning them in our world opens up an interesting can of worms for the students at the school; you have a school full of teens who are mostly desperate to find their Doors and now in walks a one woman skeleton key who could find all of their Doors for them. Could they go through the Doors if found? Or would they have to be sure?

Lost in the Moment and Found conjured forth a lot of emotions for me. As someone that lost his dad young to a heart attack, I recognise and felt a similar absence and grief that Antsy does. It also really nailed me as a dad to a young daughter, and made me want to hug my child tight and not let go. The book is really good at capturing how much grief is an absence of what was once there. There’s a hole in Antsy’s life that used to be occupied by her fun dad, and her family and all of that relationship is destroyed in an instant on the cold tile floor of a Target. It’s a book about growing up far faster than you have to, about the trade off you make with time and what you lose in adulthood.  If you know a little of grief, or even if you don’t, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.