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I started, then immediately stopped reading Lost in the Moment and Found last year when it first came out. Seanan McGuire created her Wayward Children series as brilliantly creative, fast paced YA fantasy adventure, but every volume also includes McGuire’s passionate social commentary on the endangerment, neglect, and abuse of children. In her best books, she wields this like a scalpel, and it synergizes perfectly with her tale. But in some books it feels more like she’s cutting with a hammer, and it can overwhelm her storytelling. That’s what this book felt like when I first attempted it.

The problem is the main character starts out as an endangered five year old girl. Though (as the author assures her readers in an opening note) the child escapes before her abuser can physically harm her, her sever gaslighting, grooming and endangerment in her own home dominates the first section of the book, and I found it overwhelmingly distressing to read. Even knowing that these books can be dark, it was more trauma than I was ready to deal with in a short, YA fantasy adventure.

But McGuire drew me back to this book through her next volume, Mislaid in Parts Half-Known., which I recently finished and enjoyed. The two books share the same protagonists, young Antsy, and both feature the same alternative world � a nexus world where lost things go and are organized in a magical junk shop. Antsy has come into her own in the later book, and was such a wonderful character (and her junk shop world so interesting) that I was compelled to return to this volume in order to know her full story.

I was still seriously distress by reading through the mental anguish and severe endangerment of such a young child in the book’s first section, but the reading became far more enjoyable once Antsy found her door to a truly remarkable magical land. Still, the trauma inflicted in the book’s beginning keeps me from rating this one more than three stars.