The Lost Days is the first venture into novels for Emily the Strange, the icon for goth-lite girls who want to conform to the nonconformist ideal. It’s not a particularly strong novel in its own right – it seems to be written as another thing for girls to tote around in their badge-covered tote bags trying to look alternative.

The story involves Emily arriving in the small town of Blackrock, carrying a notebook and a slingshot. She has no memory of who she is or how she got there. It’s kind of an adventure-mystery, except it’s so boring that I skipped most of it. She basically just wanders around, calls herself Earwig (I guess because Jane or Sarah aren’t strange enough?), and hangs out a lot at a coffee shop snarking on things. A bunch of cats start stalking her, and random stuff happens, but most of the characters were really boring and unlikeable.

I really can’t give you a thorough review unless I actually go back and finish the whole thing, but it’s been sitting in my room for about three weeks and the desire to finish it has never overwhelmed me. And it’s not even a particularly long book. Usually I’ll do anything to procrastinate from uni work.

The illustrations are quite cool, but Emily is drawn in her traditional simplistic way and everything else is a different style of drawing, so they don’t fit together smoothly. It’s like someone drew her face in later.

If you’re a fan of Emily the Strange and all her strangeness, you might like it. It definitely fits the requirement of being strange. But I guess the requirement of being a decent book was ignored. But, hey as long as Emily the Strange is on it, people will buy it. It’s a bit stupid though – just ‘coz you like drawings doesn’t mean you’ll like the book. I guess all I can say is that you’ll already know if this is a book you want to read.