I very much enjoyed the direction this book took from the original telling of Peter Pan. From the perspective of a grown woman, with her own child, Wendy is able to address issues I had with the original story. It is much darker and complex than I thought it would be but in a wonderful way. The trials that Wendy faces as her life progresses after returning from Neverland are at their core, things we all struggle with.

actual rating: 4.5 stars, rounded up--I want to see this turned into a movie SO badly.

<i>I'd like to thank NetGalley, A.C. Wise, and the Publisher for allowing me to have this e-ARC of Wendy, Darling in exchange for an honest review.</i>

Wendy, Darling follows a non-linear timeline where Wendy Darling and her daughter, Jane, are facing life during and after trips to Neverland. Wendy handles the consequences of not wanting to let go of her childhood place of happiness, including the effects her behaviour has on her brothers. There is so much more to Wendy than meets the eye, and the same can be said for Peter and all of the fellow Neverland residents.

When Peter appears at the window of Wendy's daughter, Jane, and spirits her away to Neverland, Wendy is heartbroken. She is struggling to remember what exactly wasn't right about Neverland, and why she and her brothers left. Once the memories break free, she remembers something dark at the heart of the island, and the heart of her friend.

+1: concept; okay I know in the acknowledgements Wise mentioned that this began as a funny 'what if' concept, but the liberties that she takes with this story are phenomenal. I also love the fact that she took the gender and racial stereotypes of the timeline and worked them into her story, helping to characterize Wendy as the stubborn, defiant woman she grows into after leaving Neverland.

+1: non-linear timeline; this was executed SO well! The present-day timeline correlated with the past timelines in a manner that made them seem almost flawlessly stitched together, and every jump back in time had an immediately relevant point that the reader gets more context of in the present. Wise also doesn't just info-dump on us, as some fantasy writers tend to do. She knows that she is working with a well-known faerie tale. Gorgeous execution.

+1: Wendy; I love this character. Wise really took the responsible, independent, leader of a young girl that Wendy was in the original tale and enhanced that as the character aged. The trauma that she experiences when she's the only one to believe in Neverland after the siblings' return home feels incredibly real, and the fact that she was able to take such god-awful experiences and draw strengths and understandings from them is remarkable. Also, bi queen for the win.

+0.5: pacing; for the first quarter or so of the book, it really is a lot of getting used to the writing style and meeting some of your favourite characters all over again. The pacing is a bit slow here, but once the 30% mark is over and gone the pacing picks up considerably.

-0.5: questions; okay this book leaves me with a lot of questions. The things that happened in Neverland while Wendy was gone are hinted at, but I want to know what <b>really</b> happened. Did Peter go crazy with grief? Did he mourn the loss of Wendy? Did the Lost Boys miss her in the years that followed? As for the ending of the book, what happens between Wendy and Ned once they're 100% honest with each other? How is Jane going to handle this abundance of information? Does Mary's shop do well? I want answers, Wise, answers!!

+1: individual characterization; while this book is about Wendy, it was incredibly nice to see that all of the character development didn't end with her. Watching her interact with Mary during their first days together and learning about her history; getting dynamics between Ned's father and everyone; seeing the world through Jane's observant eyes; knowing that some of the Lost Boys are more rebellious than even Peter could have imagined. Top tier mix of plot, character, and vibes.

This was probably the saddest rendition of a Peter Pan retelling I've read. It's compelling and interesting, but ultimately, left me bereft of any good feeling you might have had in the Neverland universe. Wendy is all grown up, married, with a young daughter of her own. She only told Jane "half truths" of the Neverland stories, so when Peter Pan creeps into her window, he takes the new "Wendy" for himself, not recognizing that Wendy is all grown up now--and Jane has no idea what is happening. This Peter is full of creeps, false bravado and machismo, secret monsters, and shadows everywhere.

This narrative would all be wonderful except that Wendy is often powerless to stop him in both Neverland and post-Neverland in the patriarchal society she finds herself thrown in--this is no adult returning to appreciate a good childhood romp with some darkness thrown in (don't think of the Robin Williams movie version, it will just make you sad). I appreciated Wendy's slow transformation into a feminist, but her character's growth to empowerment felt embittered and full of unprocessed trauma to be fully redemptive. 3 stars. There are better Pan retellings, especially in the YA genre.

I received this book for free for an honest review from netgalley #netgalley

Amazing retelling of Peter pan. I didn't even like the original piercing but this is a whole new spin on it and kept me wanting more

I love the fact that this leans into horror, both in the sense of what might’ve happened to Wendy when she came back, and, if you really think about Neverland, an island at the whim of an eternally young boy. We get a split POV, between Wendy’s daughter Jane, who is taken by Peter, and Wendy herself, whose POV also encompasses flashbacks to just after she returns from Neverland. There’s a dash of queerness that I almost wish could have been explored more, but I really like what we got. I will warn for the standard horrors of early 1900s mental hospitals and how they were used to handle women. This was a delight to read, and I highly recommend picking it up if you’d like to see more of a female centric take on the Peter Pan world that isn’t afraid to look at the darkness at the heart of Neverland

I really enjoyed reading this book. I wasn’t intending to read it all in one sitting but I did anyway. I enjoyed the darker aspects of Neverland and how nothing is ever what it seems.

I’m not really sure I would call this a feminist retelling like it was described, but there is certainly a level of intricacy to the women and their relationships in this book that often get left out of other books.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the writing. It took me a while to realize that what I didn’t really like was that it is written in the present tense and it threw me off a bit. Idk if maybe Wendy is just a really emotional person but the sheer amount of internal reflection that happened in this book was…a lot, especially for a book written in third person. I found myself skimming a lot of it tbh.

The last thing I want to comment on was the torture scene of Wendy in the mental institution. It was hard to read and honestly it could’ve been left out. We could’ve just been told instead of shown yk.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

CW for this book: graphic violence

I just reviewed Wendy, Darling by A.C. Wise. Thank you NetGalley.

Imagine a fairy tale, but much much darker.

I don’t want to give away spoilers so all I want to say is if you enjoyed Peter Pan, consider this a vastly different retelling. This story is very heavy on feminism, and touches sensitive topics such as PTSD, abuse, mental illness, and even some LGBTQ+.

Wendy Darling is badass!! This story is not for Disney fans this is a dark and twisty version of what happens to Wendy after returning from Neverland.
It is told from multiple timelines. But doesn’t jump around to much, it’s easy to follow and the writing is perfection. I was sucked in from the first chapter, it’s starts in the middle of the drama and just keeps running right until the last page. There isn’t filler pages or over embellished details. Every words is placed perfectly and I really enjoyed reading this book.

I received this book I. Exchange for my honest opinions.

DNF

I read almost 30% of the book but can't connect with the story or the characters. Maybe it was bad timing? I suppose I'll give it another try someday.

Oddly, the reason why I request this read wasn't that I loved Peter Pan's story, but exactly the opposite. As a child, while Walt Disney's films were rare treats, I always disliked Peter Pan's adaptation. Reading the presentation of "Wendy, darling", I suspected that the author would have chosen to develop a very ambivalent story, mixing fantastic memory from childhood, longing for something long vanished and the horrible reality of a nightmare masquerading as a dream. I wasn't disappointed, this book was a fantastic read.

"Wendy, darling" is a retelling of the sequel wrote by the author "When Wendy Grew Up – An Afterthought " (a play). I don't know how much it's respects the story, but I suspect that only the premises, the postulat, are the same. One the other hand, the flashbacks, which tell the first story, when Wendy was a young girl, appear really accurate.

The way Wendy has spent so much of her life time longing for Neverland (so badly translated in French as "Le pays imaginaire", "The imaginary country") strongly reminded me of the second book of the series "The magicians" by Lev Grossman, "The Magician King". The intense suffering of Julia, who knows that a magical world exists, but isn't believed, and is thought mad by her friends and relatives, is very similar to Wendy's state of mind. The impact, however, is quite different. The book shows the cruelty of the treatments which were used to be inflicted on the residents of mental institutions. And also the sexism of the period and of the original story.

I loved how Jane, Wendy's daughter, is a modern child for ther time, educated to be her own self, to pursue her own interests, even if they aren't feminine enough (readers of the magnificent "Miss Charity" by Marie-Aude Murail, or "Calpurnia Tate" by Jacqueline Kelly, will probably see the similarity). Consequently, and there is the narrative axis I so approve of, Jane isn't seduced by Peter's charm, is able to see through his manipulative and cruel self, able to be afraid of his fake perfect land, able to understand the crimes committed by a being that she quickly assessed as not completely human. Neverland is a nightmare, Peter Pan a psychopath, and if the writer cleverly explains how some children, Wendy in this case, could have been charmed and enthralled, the true nature of this alternative world, this fantasy, is never edulcorated. The lost boys are frequently stolen boys, and they lived in a dystopia where a tyran can chose to kill them at any moment.

The story unfolds nicely, the alternative narration, past and present, is very comfortable (and I'm not fan of this technique, so it's something to say) and the ending is imaginative and clever. Contrarily to me, I suspect that the author loves the original Peter Pan story and honors it in this book of theirs.

I also appreciated that all the characters were well fleshed, and the story given a strong personal atmosphere, Neverland's parts are very respectful of the original story, as far as I can judge, but the added details give a lot of personality and appeal to the retelling.

A hit for me!

It is hard to know what to say about this.

I was hoping it would go FULL uncanny valley, because it's supposed to be a "dark, horror-tinged" retelling, and the original Peter Pan book is certainly vaguely horror-tinged enough to provide fertile ground. It sort of did... and sort of didn't.

There is certainly some creepy darkness at the center of this book, and a lot of it should have been very interesting to me. For instance the true secret being Peter's shadow, which he had torn away from himself and forgotten about is honestly a GREAT detail. It should have been a GREAT twist, especially with the way it means Wendy can eventually defeat him.

Also, there's a lot more. The whole asylum thing, the way it's confirmed that Peter does do away with troublesome or too-old lost boys, like the original book hinted. The way the whole island rises and falls on his thoughtless whims. His flighty, forgetful nature imposing itself on everyone else to their own horror. There's SO MUCH here. So many good bones, that I should have loved to see explored.

Key words: should have.

It's so odd, and I can't pinpoint exactly what about this didn't work for me.

Something about the writing style was definitely over the top. This is also supposed to be a "lush, feminist" retelling, and it absolutely did succeed on that score. TOO lush. Too self-importantly deep and dramatic and "she tried, oh, how she tried," if you know what I mean. It's working WAY too hard, and not actually going anywhere.

There were so many chapters in the middle, of Wendy's POV and Jane's POV alternating on Neverland in which... nothing happened. They both just thought a bunch of sad, important thoughts and then traded POVs again. I didn't care, really, about Jane or Wendy. I would have loved to be invested in the creepiness and mystery, except that the book essentially told everyone straight up: Peter is evil and here's where we're going to find the answer to why.

And then just kept saying it over and over without explanation up until the climax, and at that point there's no suspense left to be had. I'm just a little irritated at the delay. If there was no real mystery left, I would have liked to discover the backstory. What's the deal with Peter? Why is his secret like that? What is he, and how? And why? I feel like for such an inherently complex character, his resolution was completely just a throwaway piece of action that answered no questions.

I really wanted to love this book, and there is so much here that is or should be fascinating. For some reason it just felt like there was an overload of certain content (Wendy's repetitive, deep dark emotions) and not enough of others (plot buildup, creepy suspense, worldbuilding).

Shoutout to NetGalley for providing this read! Thank you!

This book puts a dark twist on the story of Peter Pan that we all know and love. We start the book post Neverland where Wendy is now an adult with a husband and daughter. Her daughter Jane is whipped away to Neverland and it falls on Wendy to get her back. Through flashbacks, we learn that after her return as a child, Wendy has had to struggle through obstacles resulting from her trip to Neverland.

This story includes many, many flashbacks that show Wendy's life post Neverland. While there were some moments in the flashbacks that were important for context, I felt like most of it served no purpose to the present day conflict. They did provide background information but I don't think I needed to be given background information throughout majority of the book. It felt like the flashbacks into Wendy's past were meant to make me sympathize for her more or make me feel more attached to her but they didn't fulfill that purpose. If anything, I sympathized with her after hearing what she went through with her family at the very beginning. I didn't need so much in depth context of the events of her past. I'd rather her describe her past than show it in that way.

Keep in mind that I personally don't enjoy flashbacks in books but others might really love them!

This book also has multiple POVs which I enjoyed. I loved being able to know what was going on in Jane's POV while also being able to check in on Wendy's progress and thoughts. While I did enjoy the two POVs, I also think that their inner monologues were a little repetitive. Jane and Wendy had very repetitive thoughts and actions throughout most of the book. Basically I felt like most of the book I was either in Jane's head, Wendy's head, or I was reading through the past.

Overall I LOVED the darkness and eeriness that was described in Neverland. It made me feel creeped out and the mystery behind what was lurking on the island made me want to keep reading. I don't think I'll ever be able to look at Peter Pan as a character the same way ever again and I love that this book influenced me in that way!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

This is an interesting retelling of the Peter Pan tale, bringing it up to date by focusing on Wendy and her daughter Jane and making it more feminist, as well as including discussions of mental health and LGBTQ+ issues that would not have been imagined in the original text. Peter Pan has always had slightly dark undertones but Wise brings these to the fore and makes the tale rather more gothic than fairy.

First of all, thank you very much to NetGalley and Titan Books to let me read this masterpiece.

Since I was little I have been a huge fan of Harry Potter, that's so that last year I did my final project of the degree about "Peter Pan" and "Lord of the Flies".

After reading this book I found more similarities to "Lord of the Flies" than to "Peter Pan" and the scene with the boar make me realise of that. I found the book really interesting specially in Wendy's part and her "stay" in the sanatory. This story separates itself from the Peter Pan that we know especially from the one that Disney created.

If you want to know what happened to Wendy and her brothers, this is a great reading do it.

Review featured at www.books-n-kisses.com

I am not sure what I expected but it wasn’t this. This is a darker story than the Disney version of what we know of Peter Pan and Neverland. Some parts are scary and downright depressing but that doesn’t mean it is not a good read. It really is one. Just don’t go thinking this is DIsney.

In this story there is talk of abuse, PTSD and Wendy and her brothers don’t get the HEA we imagined when we saw the movie. In this story Wendy is an adult and her past is catching up to her when Peter comes back and wants her children.

As Wendy has grown and is now a mom she will do anything she has to to save her daughter including returning to Neverland.

This is an incredible follow up to the original. We always wonder if the characters end up living as an incredible life as we imagined. This story lets us know that they don’t,

Disclaimer:
I received a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

I have a lot of complicated thoughts about this book, and they all boil down to: I think this is a fascinating story, but a really poor reimagining of Peter Pan.

Wendy, Darling is not really a retelling, but an additional story, set somewhere between the events of the original Peter Pan and Hook, the Robin Williams movie about a version of Peter Pan that really does grow up (you don’t need to have seen the latter to read this book). Broadly, in Wise’s version, Wendy grew up, got married and had a child, and is forced to revisit Neverland in order to save her daughter from Pan’s clutches.

However, it tells a much darker story than the original J.M. Barrie story, about what it actually means for someone to refuse to be an adult – and therefore take responsibility for the consequences of their actions – and how terrifying it is that Neverland is built on the backs of children effectively stolen away from their parents. It also takes a huge swing at the racism and misogyny inherent in earlier iterations of the books, including the idea that Wendy, as a woman, must mother the Lost Boys, as well as the caricicatures of Native Americans. Give us more retellings that poke at racist but otherwise beloved stories, please and thanks.

The story is split between three perspectives: Wendy in the present, in search of her daughter; Wendy in the past, as we learn that she was institutionalised by her brothers after returning from Neverland, for her inability to let the story go; and Jane, Wendy’s daughter, after she is kidnapped by Pan and forced to fight her way out of the strange new world she finds herself in. The middle story is compelling; there is a real gothic element to it as Wendy finds herself trapped and alone, with no way of processing her memories, trying desparately to convince others she’s not crazy even as she starts to wonder if Neverland was the utopia she thought it was while there. There’s also a lot of interesting themes here around processing of trauma (and remembering versus forgetting as different but equally legitmate ways of doing so), and the limited options for women in post-War England, where Wendy’s only option for redemption is seemingly to be coerced into a marriage she’s not sure she wants. (Without spoilers, there is ace/aro rep in this book which made my ace heart very happy, even if it somewhat fell towards the wayside towards the end).

The other two perspectives are less compelling, mostly because Jane feels indistinguishable from pretty much every child protagonist ever, but it feels like the author wanted people to engage the most with Wendy in the past, so I didn’t mind this too much. The story as a whole is also a bit too much at points: Wendy gets abused, institutionalised, forced into marriage and then has her daughter kidnapped, and there were occasions where I was begging for a moment or two of lighthearted brevity. For those into dark retellings, this may be less of a problem – it’s certaintly a personal preference on my account.

But the reason Wendy, Darling didn’t always work for me is that the book expects you to be fully engaged with the original Peter Pan story while also skewering it. Peter is a barely a character in Wendy’s story; we mostly see him through flashbacks as she processes his real motivations and the consequences of his actions, and he feels shadowy, half-formed at best. Scenes from the original Peter Pan are often referenced obliquely. That wouldn’t be a big deal, except that it left the reader filling in the gaps from the original stories, which meant trying to reconcile the fun character of my childhood with the ominous spectre that this Peter, and it felt incongruous. Though, I should note that Peter does play a more active role in Jane’s story, and he’s legitimately terrifying in his subtle manipulation of the Lost Boys, even if he didn’t quite feel like a version of Peter I recognised (and maybe that’s the point and I should let go of my childhood nostalgia too). Similarly, the attempts to point out the racism in the original aren’t as strong as they could be, because we don’t get to relive the original scenes with Hook and the Indian tribes, meaning I couldn’t remember exactly how bad things were in the films, and therefore really grapple with the changes Wise made.

I am really interested to see what Wise writes next; Wendy, Darling was an evocative story and I’d love to see what they could do with some original gothic or dark fantasy ideas, but I wasn’t sold on it as a retelling of Peter Pan.

This was a dark, suspenseful, and beautiful addition to Peter Pan. Wendy was a complex woman, and you really saw her having to grapple with her childhood vs. adulthood throughout the whole novel. Her time in the asylum was horrific, and having to reconcile that with her past and how her brothers' viewed everything was really interesting and tragic to read. I loved Mary's and Wendy's friendship, and Ned, despite only briefly being in the book, was a great character. The juxtaposition between Jane's stint in Neverland compared to her mother's really emphasized how much had changed and how different their experiences were. Wendy's love for Jane and vice versa was one of the biggest driving forces of the book which made it that much more stressful and urgent. Peter seemed both very different and eerily similar to the Peter we grew up with, and it definitely added to the story. The book was very sad at times and overall had a very tense atmosphere, but it totally kept me hooked. This was a really fascinating take on what happened after the original story, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for other works by Wise.

I'm a big fan of retellings and this isn't my first spin on Peter Pan. However in this novel the focus, as you can guess from the title, is Wendy.

The novel is told by two characters on dual timelines. We have Wendy as an adult in the present and remembering her past with Peter, we also have Wendy as a young woman on a second time line that bridges the gap between her two stints in Neverland.

The story begins with a torturous scene as Wendy runs to the bedroom of her only daughter Jane, just as Peter arrives to steal her away. We follow Jane's journey as an unwilling hostage in Neverland.

You'll find no Tinkerbell in this Neverland, no Hook, no Croc, no mermaids, but the Lost Boys and Tiger Lily remain on an island turned bitter with secrets.

Wendy Darling is a dark look into the psyche of Peter and Wendy, the loss of innocence and the brutality of the real world. Character development is the basis of this story, and much of it is spent in the minds of Wendy and Jane.
I found both characters believable and enjoyable, their strong female independence was a treat in a London/Neverland where women are born only to care for men.

I would've perhaps liked more adventure, but the transformation of Wendy from child to mother, victim to warrior was excellent nonetheless.

I received an ARC from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

What a great follow up to the Peter Pan story. This is a raw and dark story describing what happened to Wendy and her family after returning from Neverland.

We have a front row seat to Wendy’s struggles with her family and trying to make them believe that her experiences in Neverland were real. Her brothers, not wanting to either remember or acknowledge the fact that they were there too, stick Wendy into an Asylum for a number of years.

Eventually Wendy is released and has a family of her own. Enter Peter Pan who kidnaps Wendy’s daughter, Jane. And so begins an adventure back to Neverland which is no longer the happy magical place Wendy remembers. There’s something wrong and evil happening and the root of the problem seems to be Peter himself.

I really enjoyed this take on the Peter Pan story. We see really strong female characters, a very dark version of Peter, and a peek into how life was during that time in England. I would definitely read more from this author.

I finished reading Wendy, Darling and immediately wanted to talk to someone about it. There's quite a bit to unpack here. I saw it called a retelling of Peter Pan, but that's not, in my view, truly accurate. This is Wendy's story, primarily AFTER Neverland, and how that experience shapes her life as a young woman, a sister, and a wife and mother.

The writing is very well done, with some really beautiful prose in places. The overriding theme is all about growing up and being true to who you are. This is really an adult coming of age story about a woman realizing what gives her strength.

A lot of modern topics are explored here also, such as mental illness and the stigma of those diagnosed with mental illness, PTSD, feminism, racism, same-sex relationships, and asexual preferences. Much of this is only briefly brought into the story. I found myself initially thinking the author could have done more with certain topics, but then I thought, no, it was just right. I ended up really liking how she gently eased in some of the thoughts on racism, sexuality, etc. as it never felt forced, or put there merely to be trendy, and she never told the reader what to think…merely introduced ideas that gave a lot of room for reflection.

Similarly, at times some fairly horrific events transpire which are given a glance and then backed away from. And, there are questions I have about certain plot points also, that I thought she might tie up more completely but did not. Ultimately, these are not unresolved or left dangling, but merely ambiguous. The reader is left to interpret certain events in a variety of ways. Which, when I thought about it, is a metaphor for childhood vs. adulthood. Don't children always see things differently than adults, with a very different perspective? Of course they do, and we have our own conflicting views of events from our own childhoods, where we know how we saw it as a child, but now we see it differently. I really loved that the author allowed parts of the story to be open to interpretation.

I liked Wendy, Darling a lot and definitely recommend it.