This Needs More Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust: a Review of "Lost in the Never Woods" by Aiden Thomas

Five years after Wendy Darling and her two brothers went missing in the woods surrounding the small town of Astoria, children start to disappear under mysterious circumstances. While trying to avoid reminders of her own brother’s disappearance and the town’s prying questions, Wendy almost hits a boy lying unconscious on the winding road through the woods.

After taking the boy to the hospital, Wendy has a hard time getting him out of her head. Then, he starts popping up seemingly out of nowhere claiming to be Peter Pan, a boy she thought only lived in the stories she told her brothers as a child. However, Peter insists that all of the children who are going missing now will meet the same fate as her brothers unless Wendy helps him solve the mystery of the town and face her fears over what is waiting for her in the woods.

I really wanted to like this book. Peter Pan was my favorite story as a kid to the point where I went trick-or-treating as Tinkerbell more years than not. I even tend to like Peter Pan retellings but this one just felt flat. The first couple chapters were good and I felt like I was being pulled into the story. Then I got into the body of the book and the story seemed to stall out. There were things that were happening that both Peter and Wendy said were urgent and that they had to stay on top of and then none of those things would happen. Even the end, which was one of the better parts of the book, felt rushed and underdeveloped. They manage to defeat the villain but the process of how they managed it left me feeling confused and underwhelmed. For a book that is about a magical flying boy, there is a glaring lack of magic featured in the story, particularly in the places where I expected it to be, like the climax.

I could have gotten over the plot being weaker if the characters had been well developed but they just weren’t. I feel like I know almost nothing about Wendy even though I spent the whole novel inside her head. Peter also fell flat and came off as too childish and uncaring one moment before becoming overly serious and stressed out the next. Reading his interactions with Wendy left me feeling like I had whiplash.

Even worse was Wendy’s relationship with her supposed best friend, Jordan. The reader is told repeatedly that this girl is Wendy’s best friend but we never see any real evidence of that though we are given a lot of stories about ways the girls have supported one another. Despite the history we are given, their friendship felt more like one where you used to be best friends with someone and you still call them that but you don't actually know anything about each other anymore.

All of that being said, Thomas has a writing style that is easy to read and flows nicely across the page even if the pacing of the plot feels off. They also deal with themes like grief and guilt very well. The way that the loss of her brothers makes Wendy feel and entered into most of the big decisions she made felt very realistic to me. The same can be said for how they wrote what it feels like to overcome fear and in some cases act despite being afraid.

For me, what this book did well doesn’t outweigh all of its faults and I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone, and definitely not any Peter Pan fans. That being said, every book has a reader that would like it. I am just not one of those readers.

Audience: This book is written for a Young Adult audience but I think that anyone older than that would be able to enjoy it as well. They would just have to keep in mind that it's written for a young audience.

Content warnings (contains spoilers): Implied alcoholism, emotional abuse, kidnapping, death by firearm, car accidents