This is LOST by way of a Lifetime Channel movie of the week. The female main character is weak and innocent; the male secondary characters loom large and are threatening. The "plot twist" can be seen from a mile away, and the dialog is awful. The only character from the show that the author manages to capture correctly in terms of speech patterns is John Locke; but that's not a hard thing to do because Locke, being the intellectually curious, social misfit that he is, tends to speak in the white bread parlance of literate English influenced by endless hours of reading. It's a trap that many authors often fall into: they're so busy reading, reading, and reading that they make their characters speak like book characters. Book characters should not speak like book characters, they should speak the vernacular of wherever they're from! Sawyer, especially, isn't served well.

But, alas, this kind of book is what results when a major corporation has a big hit on their hands and they don't know how to market merchandise for it. I remember the first two seasons of LOST vividly. It's probably as important to the development of today's fantasy media as HARRY POTTER or THE MATRIX of THE LORD OF THE RINGS movies. But what kind of trinkets do you sell in conjunction with a television show in which the fantastic elements are underneath its surface rather than on top? I used to joke back in 2005-2006 that there ought to be a line of LOST Legos. That never materialized, but apparently some collector's action figures did. Before ABC and Bad Robot became creative with experiments such as "Bad Twin" (which I loved, even though it's corny), they took a traditional route a la STAR WARS and ALIEN: tie-in, "non-canonical" novels. And boy, did they tank with this one.

Click on Kathy Hapka's name and you'll see that she's a prolific writer with tons of experience under her belt. I strongly disagree with the reviewers here who label "Lost: Endangered Species" as fanfiction. Rather, I imagine that she's an exceptionally competent writer who was probably offered low pay and a short time frame sans background research (the descriptions of a life of an "environmentalist" are laughable, and anyone could have put it together) to produce a narrative that was rushed to market. Writers have to eat, too. One draft and a little bit of cleaning up, and then straight to the editors for a polish. It's the type of project that, I imagine, the author probably isn't proud of and doesn't waste time looking back on. I'd guess that this was a paycheck for her, not an artistic endeavor. I don't blame her one bit, but my review is not of her, but of this final product.

1 of of 5 stars. ( )

This was bad fanfiction. Let's be honest here. I have no problems with fanfiction in general, but this had all of the hallmarks of a badly inserted character story with the exception of terrible grammar and spelling.

Faith is self-absorbed and self-righteous to an extreme. Admittedly, those characteristics are not that uncommon with Lost characters, but they do not work well when we are stuck living in one character's head with no break. She's also boring. How do you make a character who studies poisonous snakes and was involved in an enviromentalist assassination plot boring? Like this. This is how. Take notes.

Faith's (only) other important character trait is her naivety. I have never before seen it's like. There was every sign of there being something really fishy going on, and she completely missed everything because she was too self-absorbed to even notice. An all-expenses-paid trip to Australia by a 'research group' apparently too poor to operate in any place other than an abandoned shopping mall and with a staff that apparently consists of two people, one of insists she is just 'PR'? A boyfriend (who is a complete berk, by the way) who suddenly changes his tune on your relationship with your advisor after being spoken to by the PR lady, even going so far as to set up a meeting with him under false pretenses? Constant overhearing of discussion of a secret plan that comes up whenever you and your boyfriend argue? It's made worse by the constant refrain of "Think with your head, not your heart" that is apparently brought up every other page to be completely ignored. Is something suspicous going on? Then count on Faith to ignore it in favor of thinking about herself and her relationship with her boyfriend or her advisor.

I really didn't have high expectations for this. The start wasn't too bad. But the problem is that nothing happened. Faith is, at best, reactive, and the vast majority of the time is simply passive. Maybe it is hard to write a character that you know canonically dies--she can't do too much without messing up the show's (significantly better) plotline. But I made it through the whole book without ever figuring out why I should care even a little bit that she was dead, and that is a sign of bad writing. ( )

Having heard people rave about the series and fialing to catch the first few episodes I decided to read this, the first book based on the series. Faith's first few days, a light read, with some of her backstory. ( )