Lostuns Found By Sharon Skinner

 Lostuns Found 

By Sharon Skinner

Sharon Skinner is an American writer, poet, and recording artist. She was born in Buffalo, New York on December 21, 1956, but grew up in Winters, California. She started writing in the 4th grade. When she was 23 she joined the US Navy and ended up sailing on the USS Jason (AR-8) a heavy hull repair ship. The USS Jason was a distinguished ship that served from World War II to the mid-1990s (No way its design life was that long, damn!  Probably a Ship of Theseus by the end there.), was heavily decorated for its many achievements under fire, and was the first ship to sail with female crew members. Ms. Skinner served on the ship in 1980 while it was stationed in Diego Garcia. 

After her service, she worked a wide variety of jobs including arthouse production manager, telephone sales representative, professional trainer, visual information systems coordinator, and consultant. She also did this while pursuing secondary education, because as I can personally assure the American people the GI Bill is nowhere as generous as you think it is (Especially back then.). She graduated from Mesa Community College with an associate's Degree, then Ottawa University with a bachelor's degree in English Language and Literature/Letters. Afterward, she graduated from Prescott College with a master's in Creative Writing. She also served as executive editor for Anthology literary magazine while in college. 

After graduating Ms. Skinner focused on her writing as well as hosting the Radiant Reading internet show. The show featured her reading the works of various authors. Meanwhile, she wrote grants professionally while working on her own novels and poems so I assume she didn't sleep much (Certainly not.). In 2009 she joined the Grant Professionals Association National Board and is a certified GPC Grant Professional. In 2010 she published her first novel and many more would follow. She mostly writes fantasy, science fiction, paranormal, and the occasional steampunk. On top of that, She also serves as the Regional Advisor for SCBWI Arizona, a division of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Lostuns Found is one of her more recent works only published last year in 2022. 

Lostuns Found takes place mostly in the city of Landings. A smoke and pollution-choked city powered by steam and I assume after reading the book human suffering (Well obviously.  The steam engines aren’t enough.  You need pain engines to run a modern society.). The city has a very Victorian London feel straight from the darkest parts of A Christmas Carol combined with steampunk technology run amuck. Ms. Skinner honestly does a great job of building the character of the city itself without being too heavy-handed. Simply by doing things like describing how her characters dare not go outside without at the very least heavy cloth masks to protect their lungs from the heavy miasma of ash and soot from the ever-running factories that both power the city and choke the life out of it (That actually makes them more Health and Safety conscious than the actual Victorians, who went out into a London that was so polluted moths evolved camouflage for soot, without the masks.). 

The city of Landing, as you would expect, has a great multitude of orphans on the streets. They hide in the corners and cracks of the city doing whatever they have to do to get their food and shelter while most adults treat them as vermin. They are actively hunted by corrupt law enforcement to be put into workhouses, where many of them die from overwork and malnutrition (So, basically any Victorian city. {I don’t know there’s a shocking lack of lead and asbestos in the walls} That the narrative tells you about.  The street urchins won’t know why the paint chips are sweet.). As if life wasn't harsh enough for these unwanted children, something else is hunting them and street children are disappearing to an unknown fate in alarming numbers... Well alarming for some of the other street children as no one else seems to care. This includes a number of those street children who regard the disappearance as reduced competition for scarce resources in a good number of cases. 

The street children of Landing are divided into gangs and crews of orphans who are ruthless in carving out territories and keeping nonmembers out of those territories. It's hard to judge them for that given the razor-edged existence they live in and the fact that this shouldn't be a problem they have to face in the first place! society has however abandoned them and if the adults won't show them empathy and compassion why should we expect them to show it to each other? Where would they learn it from and how could they afford to?

Some however do show empathy and compassion. Such as our male protagonist Gage, who refuses to follow the orders of his crew leader Cheeks. Instead of keeping his head down and focusing on getting bread, Gage is spending his rapidly diminishing resources on looking for the missing members of his crew, as more of them go out in the morning to hunt for food and money but simply never come back. Part of this is his stubborn belief that his crew is his family and loyalty must be given. Another part is the ever-present guilt he carries for past failures driving him to do better for his crewmates. Gage isn't the cleverest or strongest person on the street but he is compassionate and willing to put himself at great risk to achieve his goals which might carry him far... If it doesn't get him murdered or taken one night. 

Meanwhile, our female protagonist Wynd has abandoned her gang, despite being their leader. Because her brothers are among the missing and she swore to her dead father and missing mother that she would look after them. Well fairer to say that they refused to help her and cast her out for daring to want to look for them. Despite that, Wynd is driven to fulfill her word and not lose her last bits of family and belonging in a world that has turned against her and stolen from her every chance it got. She is more practical and hard-edged than Gage in all honesty and frankly a bit smarter but she is just as loyal as he is. She also has a good heart that might be her strongest asset or her own downfall but you'll have to read to see. 

Wynd and Gage will have to unravel a tangled riddle of strange non-steam-powered technology, smugglers, and a dark-haired pirate captain with a murderous henchman, who keeps appearing whenever they get too close to the answers they're looking for. As well as figure out how bizarre mechanical monsters fit into this. They'll have to do this while burying their antagonism as they come from rival gangs and have been conditioned by their hard lives to mistrust one another. There's also a certain element of personality clashing as Gage is an empathetic dreamer... For a street kid operating on the ragged edge of survival and Wynd having had all her hopes and dreams dashed repeatedly is brutally focused on what's in front of her and the practicalities of making it to the next day. It's not quite the odd couple but it produces its fair share of arguments. (I can imagine.)

As Wynd and Gage struggle to work together and build an unlikely coalition of allies to find out where their fellows have disappeared and try to hammer out something like a rescue, they find themselves in increasing danger from all sides because the stakes are higher than they can know.  And if they fail there's no one left to miss them. The character work here is honestly pretty good, both of them serve as viewpoint characters letting us see the world around them through their eyes (Do we have fun chapters where we see the same argument through each set of eyes? {Sort of, there’s a fight that isn’t shown but we see both characters thinking about what they thought happened}). Ms. Skinner does a good job of making them both distinctive enough that even if no names were used you could very quickly figure out which character is serving as our viewpoint. As both of them have distinctive voices and word choices as well as different ways of thinking and operating. 

That said, there are characters especially those introduced in the later parts of the book that suffer for that as they simply don't get the attention they need to stand out and are left feeling somewhat more like plot devices than people.  Additionally, the antagonists are rather flat having zero development (Is this a function of the narrative form being two kids?  Because if you stick to their POV ruthlessly enough, an antagonist might not get much development, because the POV characters don’t understand them. {That could be it but it’s still unsatisfying}).  So you’re left feeling that they’ve resorted to child labor because they noticed that they weren’t meeting their evil quota for the year and needed to pull off something amazing to make sure they aced their performance review and nailed down their end-of-year evil bonuses.  Yes, I know child labor was a thing in the Victorian age but these guys built up a large kidnapping and smuggling ring and there’s not much motivation given for it

The story itself is very narrowly focused and there is minimal world-building. We learn about the underside of the city of Landing and not much else. In fact, we never really get a sense of who runs Landing or if Landing is a city-state or part of a larger nation. It simply isn't important to the story so Ms. Skinner doesn't cover it. In all fairness, I don't think Gage or Wynd would spend all that much time meditating on geopolitics or economics given their situation and background (Yeah, that’s not the level their world operates in.  So they wouldn’t talk about it.  So the reader doesn’t learn it.). This creates a very tightly woven narrative that is focused on the immediate story. Which I think actually helps, not every fantasy needs to be a 1000-page plus door stopper that examines a fantasy world in great scope and depth. In fact, some stories are much better off being much more focused and smaller in scale. 

The book itself is under 250 pages and makes for an entertaining read with the plot never getting bogged down and the pacing kept at a decent speed. The minimalist worldbuilding is both a virtue and a flaw as there are some elements of the world that leave me scratching my head and wishing that we could spend some time looking at them in more depth.  None of that gets so bad as to detract from the plot, even after you realize the inspiration of the story...  I won't share that with you because I would hate to ruin the surprise. Lostuns Found by Sharon Skinner gets a B- from me. The book was still an entertaining and interesting read with good pacing but I also kinda wish that later elements had been given more time and attention. Still better than a lot of the average novels so it’s worth your time to read. 

I hope you enjoyed this review.  If you did consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where for as little as a dollar a month you get a vote on upcoming reviews and themes.  Not only is there a poll up right now you can vote on but there is a suggestion thread for upcoming content this summer.  Our next two reviews will be guest works and then we will be spending the summer looking at the myth and stories of Atlantis.  I hope to see you there!  Until then, take care of yourself, each other, and as always, Keep Reading! 

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders