Rating: 
Summary: All the Reviews are On-Target
Review: Every so often I see a film or read a book that 'disturbs' me for several days. Symptoms including a dazed/off-center mental state and a distraction from 'reality' possessed me in the days after seeing. 'Schindler's List', 'The Sixth Sense', and reading Malachi Martin's 'Hostage to the Devil'. This 'disturbance' has its good and bad qualities. Best of all, it is stimulating, helps clear my mind and provoke deep thoughts. So I was surprised when 'Lost Boys' affected me the same way.If you're a parent, this book will disturb you in many ways. OSC puts in writing every nightmare a parent has over the sanity and safety of his/her kids--- kids getting lost, adjustment problems at a new school and town, creepy people whom you're not quite sure to trust your kids with, the evils of computer/video games, child predators... On a par with 'Ender's Game', 'Lost Boys' has good plot and fine 3-D characters. For you Ender fans, OSC spins a different kind of story here---one about the mundane issues of everyday family life. However, as you turn the pages, you care more and more about what happens to the family, while suspense and creepiness build higher and higher. Card skillfully moves the story and mood along. You also get an interesting and frank look at husband-wife relationship dynamics that portrayed each's side very well. Some OSC readers (or the uninitiated) may criticize the way he weaves 'Mormonness' into his work. I always found the tie-in of his Faith to his books as interesting and informative adjuncts to his story, and not as 'missionary work' for his Church. 'Lost Boys' is no exception. Faith and Family are important elements of this story, and Card gives us a little more than a peek at what Life-As-a-Mormon is all about. I agree in part with the reviewer who loved all but the ending. True, the pace is sluggish for the first half, and then increases steadily. The ending comes hard and with a jolt. But that's not all bad. Because at the end, that 'disturbed' feeling hit me, and I reflected long and hard about things I hadn't seriously thought about before.
Rating: 
Summary: card's worst
Review: First off, Card is my favorite author period. I read an essay of his where he states that Lost Boys is his best work. Sorry, but I couldn't even finish it...it bored me to tears. He should have left well enough alone with the short story (which was absolutely perfect).
Rating:
Summary: card's worst
Review: First off, Card is my favorite author period. I read an essay of his where he states that Lost Boys is his best work. Sorry, but I couldn't even finish it...it bored me to tears. He should have left well enough alone with the short story (which was absolutely perfect).
Rating:
Summary: It speaks to parents on a very deep level...
Review: I read this book for the first time not long after it came out, when I was still single and had no children of my own. I enjoyed it for the characters, and appreciated the innovative ending, which isn't what anyone would expect, even if you went in looking for a paranormal mystery. I just read it again, and it was vastly different for me, because now I am a parent and a husband. Now I noticed all the details about the moral and emotional dilemas faced by the characters, about the way people have to face the fears of the world outside. There isn't a false word in the book. Every observation Card makes about people, about love, about good and evil, rings absolutely true. as much as I love the book, I have to take away one star because it is absolutley heartbreaking. The grief in the ending, even though it is mixed with a wonderfully transcendent kind of hope, is simply overwhelming. If you have children you will want to grab them and hold them close when you finish this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Living the joys and horrors of a family
Review: I've been reading Orson Scott Card for some years, and I know how he can insinuate a story into your life. But I was quite unprepared for the lingering after-effects of this story.I had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Card read from this book at a local bookstore in Chapel Hill, NC and I was caught up in the day-to-day travails of this family. The passages told of the plain, ordinary demons who live amongst us - in this case, an elementary school teacher who is arbitrarily down-grading a child's science project. Even with as plebian a subject as that, Mr. Card had us all hanging on every word, waiting anxiously to hear what would happen... And the rest of the story is just as detailed and rings just as true, as that portion. There ARE everyday demons all about - mean-sprited teachers, bad managers at work, and spooky co-workers. And sometimes, there is a larger evil lurking there in the dark... I AM NOT a fan of horror tales, and this is truly not one. But there ARE horrors in it, both large and small. Do yourself a favor - read it. You will quickly find yourself totally submerged into the lives of this good family. And, if you're anything like me, they and their story, will stay with you for a long, long time.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing, but a good read
Review: Its interesting to see some of the parallel stories within Card's books. When I first read Lost Boys, for some reason I saw many similarities with his book Lovelock, co-authored by Kathy Kidd. But you could make the same argument for Ender's Game. In many of his stories, you have this tragic hero, and at the end of each you have overwhelming loss...with a little bit of light. And yet that flicker of light is strong enough to stand against the darkness of the loss. That is how this book made me feel - that underneath everything that goes amiss in your life, there is still that spark of light.
So what is the book actually about? Originally written as if was Card's own family story, its about a neighborhood murderer, and how their son tries to help the young victims. There really isn't a happy ending here, folks -- its a clear departure from his previous works, and its my understanding that this book is one of the first in a line of stories created with the intent of being made into film. This would definitely make a good movie - something with a Silence of the Lambs feel, though.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent
Review: Normally, anyone writing about Southern eccentricities has to worry about imitating Faulkner, but OSC is the exception. The book was a worthwhile read for a Cardophile like myself, but to be honest, its punch was not any greater than the short story upon which it's based. Also, like the short story, there are a number of loose ends, the biggest of which is the place the video games the lost boys played in the overall plot.
The book also took a little too long to make its point. I do have to admit that the characters were extremely well-drawn and believable, and I suppose that brevity and well-drawn, believable characters are to a certain extent mutually exclusive. I enjoyed some of the inside humor, such as "Eight Bits" as the place of employment for "Byte," which is where Card himself actually worked. I'm sure he's also settling the score with some of his former Byte co-workers too (i.e., the real-life equivalents of Dicky and Glass), although a third party like myself will never know for sure. And comparing a testimony meeting to a hysterical experience had me literally laughing. The Mormons are lucky that Card is still on their side, because if he weren't -- watch out! Overall, read it if you've got some time, but the short story can get the job done in about a sixth the time.
Rating:
Summary: Blindsided!
Review: That's how I felt when I finished THE LOST BOYS. I've read O.S. Card's Earth series, his Alvin series, the Ender series, even Stone Tables, but nothing prepared me for this seemingly lighthearted tale of a Mormon family. Like others before me, I recommend that you save a large block of time for reading the last 100 pages--you won't want to put it down. Yes, you have to meander to get to the end, but it is a pleasureable journey, getting to know Step, Deanna, and the kiddies. Just when you think you've figured out the bad guy, WHAM! you get blindsided by what feels like a freight train. For days, I was shell-shocked. I shared the book with my teenage son (a Stevie-like boy who reads far too much to often be impressed by a book), and he had the same reaction. To be kind, we shared it with his father who called our son "Stevie" while reading it and could only hug him and cry when he finished the story. Then we shared it with a best friend who wouldn't speak to us for days after having her heart broken. Read it and weep! It is the most disturbing book I've ever read, but sometimes it's good to have your emotions shaken!
Rating:
Summary: Not Card's best work
Review: The back of the book pitches 'Lost Boys' as some sort of horror/mystery/ghost story, but it isn't really. It's basically a book about an average family that's trying to cope with all sorts of petty, real-world problems. The father's stuck working with jerks at a job he hates, the mother's unsure how she should handle difficult people in her church volunteer work, the son is picked on at school by the other children...you get the idea. Realistic people dealing with realistic problems, just trying to get by and do the right thing. There's a bit of a supernatural element in the story, but it's quite timid and doesn't really have much to do with the majority of the plot. It's vaguely creepy when the son starts talking with imaginary friends who are dead, but nothing comes of it until the very end of the book, and I just sort of stopped caring about it after the first few hundred pages. Actually, 'not caring' pretty much sums up my thoughts on most of the book. Maybe I'm too jaded, but reading about highly realistic characters dealing with highly boring every-day problems just isn't very interesting to me. If I wanted 'real life' I wouldn't have read a fiction book. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate realistic characters and a believable plot, but Card crossed the line between 'believable' and 'mundane'. There were several other problems. The book never resolves certain issues. For example throughout the book the main character's son plays a mysterious video game that he tries to hide from his father, and Card hints that there's something supernatural going on. Unfortunately Card just sort of drops it toward the end of the book, along with several other subplots. There are also a few points where the characters behave in jarringly unbelievable ways, the most notable being a police detective who is blissfully unconcerned when he learns that the family's son knows secret details of about a string of serial murders and is able to provide information that should only have been known to the killer. The detective simply dismisses it as the son "being so in touch with the good that when bad things happen he's sensitive to it." What the heck? The occasional moments of implausibility are especially noticeable because the rest of the story is so ordinary and believable. All that being said, I still have to give this book 3 stars because of Card's fantastic writing ability. Even when writing about incredibly boring stuff, he manages to do it very well. As a few other people have pointed out, certain aspects of the book are probably highly autobiographical for Card. Like the main character in the story, Card himself fell upon hard times early in his writing career and had to take a relatively menial job in order to make ends meet. It's interesting to speculate on exactly how much of the story was fiction and how much was based on fact.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting end, but largely predictable and mostly dull
Review: The end of this story has quite a twist that will give you chills. The problem is, the very end is the ONLY part of the book that is suspenseful or chilling. To get there, you have to get through long and very UNexiciting depictions of everyday family life and Mormon values. To be fair, these depictions are very well-written. The glimpse into Mormon life was interesting (for a while). The characters were likeable and I worried about their welfare as the story went along. However, their marital spats and moral wranglings and daily routines got quite tedious by the end. The author managed to be impressively unoffensive with his religious preachings, but there IS quite a lot of preaching as the book goes along, which also got tiresome. The whole long build-up was a complete mismatch for the sudden ending. It was obvious all along that Stevie's "imaginary friends" were the ghosts of the dead boys, and the parent's failure to question their child enough to figure this out was maddening. There are several candidates for the "bad guy" and the initial obvious choice is of course not the right one, but the initial "red herrings" are exposed long before the end so that the real bad guy is no surprise. The end gave me a chill and wrenched my heartstrings, but it was a cheat-- after lulling me into boredom it then slapped me awake barely in time to watch it end and be done. There was no catharsis. Orson Scott Card could have (and has!) done much better.
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