Normally I don’t post reviews directly on my blog, choosing instead to select some of my favourites and putting clips on my book page along with links to the full article.
But, this time I had to make an exception. I wanted a copy of this here because I wanted to remember that sometimes I really do make an impact on readers, and reviewers.
This. This is why I do it, folks!
Reposted from On Spec: May 4, 2025: https://onspec.ca/book-reviews-page-lorina-stephens/
Lost Lives
Noah J.D. Chinn
372 pages
Release: January 30, 2025
ISBN 9798230577782
Publisher: Noah Chinn Books
Noah Chinn is a Canadian author living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of 13 books ranging across a variety of genres. His work has appeared in Amazing Stories, Knights at the Dinner Table, and The Globe and Mail, to name a few.
Lost Lives is the third of the Get Lost Saga.
First, the marketing blurb:
You can go your whole life in the Void without trouble ever finding you. Moss doesn’t have that kind of luck.
First, there was the stowaway, the pirate, and a centuries-old mystery drifting through the void of space.
Then, there was the robbery that became a rescue mission, and a race to escape the Silver Legion.
Now, these past events are on a collision course, and Maurice “Moss” Foote is stuck in the middle… again.
For Moss, nothing is ever simple, not even a day on the beach. It’s not long before he and his crew are on the run from the authorities, hiding in a junkyard, being double crossed, and helping the secretive Order clean up what should have been a simple diplomatic matter. It’s only fair. He did help create the mess in the first place.
But actions have consequences, and soon the events from Lost Souls and Lost Cargo collide in the most unexpected ways.
Lives will be lost, but with luck, a future will also be found.
You know that feeling you get when you’ve had that perfect cup of coffee on that perfect morning? That sense of completion and being complete, of knowing your place in the world and finding contentment in that? As corny as that sounds, it was that encompassing sense of perfection and place I felt when I finished Lost Lives, the last book in Noah Chinn’s Get Lost Saga.
And those who know me as either an individual or a reviewer, will also know I’m a harsh editor and critic, have a tendency to impatience and dismissiveness when I read something I think is derivative or just lacking imagination and good writer’s craft. So, for me to write that Noah Chinn is a master of his genre and his craft, is not praise lightly given. Frankly, I’d stand him up against Robert J. Sawyer, Nalo Hopkinson, and a league of others any day. As a juror, having just finished reading almost 100 novels for the 2025 Sunburst Award, I do have to say reading Lost Lives (not a submission) was a joy and a relief. In fact, as soon as this new library of mine is built, I am purchasing hard copies of the saga to archive among the legendary writers who have influenced and brightened my imagination.
There are those who are going to say the novel is only escapist science fiction, that it’s meant to be nothing more than consumable pulp, without literary merit. Well, those people are wrong. Noah Chinn is one of those rare writers who has the ability to not only craft a rocketing (forgive the pun) good space adventure, filled with fascinating, fully-realized and believable characters, but also subtly weave into that narrative a moral tale, a cautionary one, and do so without resorting to saccharine, heavy-handed bloviation. His ability to sustain tension across many characters and viewpoints is deftly done. His worldbuilding is believable. Comic relief? Yep, he does that as well with an assassin’s deftness. There was more than once I found myself snickering aloud because of some deliciously ridiculous moment.
But he also has the ability to rein things in with sobering observation. This paragraph, near the end of the novel, whispers to me still:
…the only things that endure are the lies we tell ourselves. The stories…. And I remembered that stories aren’t all lies. They’re full of lies, but the stories that matter are like guides. They point toward the truth.
Well, isn’t that just so.
Well done, Noah.
If you’re looking for a thoughtful read, one that will take you to unknown places, accompanied by believable characters just trying to do the right damned thing against all odds, you absolutely need to look up Noah Chinn and his Get Lost Saga.
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