Before Peter Pan belonged to Wendy, he belonged to the girl with the crow feather in her hair. . .
Fifteen-year-old Tiger Lily doesn’t believe in love stories or happy endings. Then she meets the alluring teenage Peter Pan in the forbidden woods of Neverland and immediately falls under his spell.
Peter is unlike anyone she’s ever known. Impetuous and brave, he both scares and enthralls her. As the leader of the Lost Boys, the most fearsome of Neverland’s inhabitants, Peter is an unthinkable match for Tiger Lily. Soon, she is risking everything — her family, her future — to be with him. When she is faced with marriage to a terrible man in her own tribe, she must choose between the life she’s always known and running away to an uncertain future with Peter.
With enemies threatening to tear them apart, the lovers seem doomed. But it’s the arrival of Wendy Darling, an English girl who’s everything Tiger Lily is not, that leads Tiger Lily to discover that the most dangerous enemies can live inside even the most loyal and loving heart.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Peaches comes a magical and bewitching story of the romance between a fearless heroine and the boy who wouldn’t grow up.
Let me tell you something straight off. This is a love story, but not like any you’ve heard. The boy and the girl are far from innocent. Dear lives are lost. And good doesn’t win. In some places, there is something ultimately good about endings. In Neverland, that is not the case.
Oh, this book. I fell in love with it. Definitely one of my all time favorites. I don’t know how to write this review or how to express my love for this story because it left me speechless. I don’t remember reading something like this before. It’s written in a classical style and gives vivid descriptions, so you don’t need to put in much effort to imagine the world where the story takes place. Although it’s an interpretation of Peter Pan, I find the characters unique and fresh. The story is told by Tinker Bell, but she is more of an observer. This book is about Tiger Lily.
I admired this girl who never cried, even when her heart was broken to pieces. I admired her strength and loyalty. She wasn’t beautiful, and she had a “manly” build, but it didn’t matter because she captured me with her personality.
There was a beast in there. But there was also a girl who was afraid of being a beast, and who wondered if other people had beasts in their hearts too. There was strength, and there was also just the determination to look strong. She guarded herself like a secret.
Tiger Lily grew up with a father who was a leader of the tribe. Others were afraid of her, thinking that she was cursed, but they still loved her in their own way. Everything started to change when she decided to save a man from England after the shipwreck. Yes, this Neverland is set in a real world. People there are aging, though they stop at some moment. The most shocking thing for me was that Peter and his boys couldn’t fly.
We had never seen the lost boys; we didn’t know quite what they were—ghosts or demons or living men. They were the only creatures in the forest we couldn’t find to spy on, but they left evidence of themselves: carcasses of beasts and prey in their wake, and sometimes a pirate skull dangling from a tree. These boys were famous for their violence; they were known to eat wild animals raw with their bared teeth, and to steal girls who wandered alone.
These boys and this Peter are not characters from Barrie’s book. They are lonely, looking for ways to entertain themselves while living an infinite life. They aren’t searching for trouble with pirates because they understand how dangerous it might be. And they all want someone to take care of them because they are just a bunch of kids. Peter is their leader, who might be fearless in the day, but who has nightmares at night. He is not selfish; he feels responsible for his friends. But what they all lack is a woman’s attention. So when he meets Tiger Lily, it’s like two magnets are pulled together by the only thing they have in common: loneliness. Tiger Lily is wary at first, but she soon enough gets attached to these boys and, of course, falls in love with Peter — so brave and restless on the outside, but troubled on the inside, just like her.
Sometime deep in the night, after keeping her awake with his fitfulness, he woke with a start, and in the near pitch-black he pulled her tight, like they were on the ocean and she was keeping him afloat.
But Tiger Lily is still bound to her tribe. She is supposed to marry a horrible man, but she can’t just leave him and live with the Lost Boys because there are people she loves — like her father, a man who has a woman’s spirit, and her best friend, who is weak and gets beaten by his mother.
Anderson’s Neverland is also home to pirates, broken souls that were seeking for eternal youth but found only their true dark nature. And, finally, there’s Wendy, who doesn’t fly to the second star to the right and straight on ’til morning, but who sails on a ship to Neverland. She’s a perfect girl, but not the one we’d grown accustomed to.
Every character here is a piece of art, and they all have a personality that makes you care for each one of them. Most importantly, Neverland is still in all its glory, with lagoons full of mermaids and dark jungles teemed with fairies.
I’d call this book a psychological fairytale, told by one of the most loyal creatures you’ve ever read about and describing one of the most heartbreaking romances ever. Read it. You won’t regret it.