I liked this book a lot, but I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to.

Grace was an extremely relatable character as someone who just graduated and is trying to figure out what’s next. 

All of her struggles with systemic racism and mental illness and family pressure and internal pressure were beautifully written.

I loved the friendships in this book. Grace’s friendship with Raj might have been my favorite, but they were all wonderful in their own ways, and I loved how diverse and complicated the supporting cast was.

I also thought that the open ending was very fitting.

And I really appreciated what the book was saying about stories and self-love and taking space for yourself without forgetting the people around you and their needs. 

Now on to the things I liked less.

While I appreciated that romance wasn’t treated as a cure for Grace’s problems and it wasn’t really the focus of the book, I did not find Grace and Yuki’s relationship compelling at all. Most of Yuki’s dialogue is actually monologues in the form of her radio show, and outside of that, I didn’t feel like I fully grasped who she was as a character, which is weird because the book spends a lot of time with her. I think this was partly because of the occasional time skips and partly because there aren’t enough scenes of Grace and Yuki just hanging out. I felt like I knew Yuki the least well out of all of the characters. I liked her in theory, but she just never fully came into focus for me.

The book is written in present tense, which is fine, but some of the flashbacks were also in present tense, which was a confusing and counterintuitive choice.

I also thought that some of the pacing was sort of off.

But overall, this book was really enjoyable. Grace Porter is a fantastic main character. It’s full of deep, genuine emotions and lovely relationships (the romance notwithstanding), and I highly recommend it.

This book is fantastic. It’s a fascinating and excellent new addition to the utopian/dystopian literary canon. 

In good dystopian fiction, the world seems like a utopia or is meant to be a utopia but turns out to have something wrong with it. Often, fixing it means overturning the whole new society completely. In this case, it’s less about changing the whole system again—the revolution already happened and was successful—and more about finding the cracks in the new framework. 

I wouldn’t have minded a longer look at this world, but I think that this book set out to tell a very specific story and then did it. I’m excited for the prequel, which I think is going to cover the actual revolution.

Anyway, maybe my favorite thing was the look at the ways that adults ignore children and invalidate their real problems in an attempt to protect them. 

There were a lot of other things I liked, but overall, I just think that anyone who’s interested in this sort of book should read it.

I liked this book a lot overall, but I did have a couple of issues with certain aspects of it.

I really enjoy Aiden Thomas's writing style. It's beautifully descriptive and always delivers just the right amount of information.

The plot structure and a lot of the relationships are actually very similar to Cemetery Boys. I felt like Cemetery Boys had stronger characters and Lost in the Never Woods had stronger plotting, but the details of the two books are very different and other readers might not agree with me on that. Both books explore grief, but they do so in very different ways.

The actual Peter Pan adaptational choices are creative and interesting. I don't want to spoil anything, but there were some choices and twists that really worked and made this old story feel new. Peter and Wendy felt like the same characters but reinterpreted in an intentional and interesting way. The take on the shadow was particularly compelling. The cops, especially a particular detective, felt like a new take on the pirates, which I thought was a fantastic choice. I also think it was wise of Aiden Thomas to fully write out Tiger Lily et al and create a new best friend character for Wendy named Jordan. I liked Jordan a lot and would have liked to see more of her.

I listened to the audiobook, and I highly recommend it. Avi Roque narrates both of Aiden Thomas's books, and they're fantastic. I will listen to any book they narrate.

I want to preface this critique with a disclaimer: I don't think that authors from marginalized backgrounds owe us diversity. They don't owe us identity-based trauma. They don't owe us autobiographical narratives. I fully support Aiden Thomas's decision to write a book that is not diverse because this is simply the story they wanted to tell.

But the whiteness and the heteronormativity of this book did bother me. And I think it's because of the subject matter.

See, a lot of this book is about missing children, and in reality, children of color go missing all the time and get less media attention and fewer resources than white children who go missing. Children of color are absent from a lot of conversations about missing children, and ultimately, they were totally missing from this book, too. I know that Oregon, where this book is set, is very white, but this just felt like a weird blind spot. Maybe I noticed this more because Cemetery Boys addressed this exact issue directly. Maybe that means that I'm holding the author to an unfair standard, but I think I would have had this issue no matter who wrote this book. And maybe all Peter Pan retellings are going to struggle when it comes to racial issues due to the inherent racism in the original text. I don't know.

Otherwise, my only real issue with this book was the romantic subplot. I didn't personally like it, but it was necessary for the plot and executed better than I expected.

Honestly, I think the reason I didn’t like this book more is just the inherent fact of it being a Peter Pan retelling. I don’t think that the Peter Pan story is fixable. I think it’s inherently problematic to ship Peter and Wendy together. I don’t think I’ll be reading any more Peter Pan retellings after this.

Overall, though, I enjoyed this book a lot, and I absolutely recommend it if the premise sounds interesting to you!

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

I feel weird about rating nonfiction, but I'm giving this book five stars anyway because I loved it so much.

I know this won't be for everyone. If you don't like experimental writing or you're not already familiar with queer theory or queer history to some extent, this book isn't a great starting point.

But if you know that you like those things and you want an examination of queer abuse—specifically abusive sapphic relationships and the archival silence that surrounds them—you should definitely read this book.

Certain chapters felt like crawling into my own brain if I'd lived different experiences, which was very surreal.

Carmen Maria Machado was already a favorite author for me after Her Body and Other Parties, but she's even more of one now. I love what she does with her writing, and I can't wait to read more of it.

2023 REREAD THOUGHTS:

This hurts now. When I read this the first time, a lot of stuff resonated, but mostly I found it brilliant on the level of structure. I thought it was doing brilliant and important work. I still do, for sure, but now I’ve been in an abusive queer relationship, and reading this was very very painful. I’m honestly not sure why I did this to myself. Hopefully, maybe, it will help. We’ll see.

Somehow I’ve never written a review of this book before now.

It’s a while since I read it, but I hate Messenger. I hate what it does to the characters and the world, but more than anything, I hate the way it removes the ambiguity of the previous two books. Nothing is up to interpretation anymore, and that’s disappointing when The Giver and Gathering Blue are both so open-ended and so creative and so good at exploring different possible dystopian futures. 

Maybe you’ll like this one if you want confirmation that Jonas was the boy who was mentioned at the end of Gathering Blue and you really want the two previous books to be explicitly linked, but I don’t think it’s a good book even then.

I felt like this book was stronger than The Gilded Wolves in a lot of ways, especially near the end, but it did take longer to read because of the Russia of it all. 

There are two main emotional threads running through this book: Laila's impending expiration date and the group's grief at Tristan's death. These two things affect all of the main characters in different ways, and I thought that the way they played into the ending was executed very well. I'm glad that I already have the last book so I won't have to wait forever to see how things get resolved.

Most of this book takes place in Russia, and it feels very Russian, which means that it's high on depression and low on plot for about 200 pages.

A lot of this book is spent on mourning a character who I never really cared about, so it's a testament to Roshani Chokshi's writing abilities that she got me to care so much about everyone else's grief.

I liked Séverin less in this book. I got sick of his flashbacks, and I didn't find his arc compelling until the very end. I liked Laila more than before, though. She felt more complicated and less overpowered, and her relationships with the other characters were portrayed in a really compelling way. That being said, I also stopped caring about their romance at all, which is a problem when so much of the story hinges on it.

Enrique and Zofia continue to be my favorites. There wasn't enough of Enrique in this book, but what we got was executed perfectly, especially when it came to his relationship with Hypnos. But Zofia was the real star. I loved everything that this book did with her character.

No spoilers but the ending is WILD and yeah I'm really glad that I'll be reading The Bronzed Beasts sometime in the next month rather than a year from now.

No idea why I gave this book four stars in the past because I have always hated it. The main character is unlikable and very racist. The book itself is hard to read. I’ve never understood why this is such a classic when A Little Princess is RIGHT THERE (that book also has issues with racism but it’s at least an enjoyable read with an engaging main character). Disease also plays a pretty prominent role, and I feel like I would like that even less now than I did as a child. Anyway, I would honestly recommend skipping this book altogether and just watching the 1993 movie instead. 

I loved this book when I read it as a child, probably partly because I associated it so much with my grandmother. And I still think it’s good. It’s beautifully written, and the friendships are fantastic. But it’s so racist. I think I ignored the racism because The Secret Garden is so much worse, but it’s very much present in this book too. I do think that a lot of it would still hold up, but I probably wouldn’t intentionally recommend this to children. 

This book was definitely enjoyable. I hadn’t read anything with fairies in a while, so that was fun. The mix of the fairy world and the mortal world was interesting, and I thought the worldbuilding was pretty good and easy to follow.

Jude was an interesting main character, and I liked the focus on her familial relationships, which are all very complicated. Madoc and Oriana feel like flat characters but then get fleshed out more later on, which I liked. Jude’s relationship with Madoc was especially compelling. And I really loved Vivi. She’s fantastic. But Taryn? She’s meant to be Jude’s mirror, and she even says so herself, but I didn’t really understand her or her motivations at all, so she was definitely the weakest character for me.

The politics and the action are the other compelling part of this book. There’s a lot of plot and a lot of characters, but it was never confusing and always exciting.

The romance was definitely the worst thing for me. I don’t understand why people like the romance in this book so much (or why it’s such a big part of the marketing) when it’s so underdeveloped and honestly kind of boring. Or maybe I just don’t take teen romance that seriously, but I really don’t think the author spent all that much time on that aspect of the story compared to everything else.

I would probably have rated this book a bit higher, but I hate first-person present tense except when used very intentionally, and I definitely think it was the wrong choice for this book. It bugged me the whole way through. There was one particular moment when Jude was aware that she was addressing an audience, and that just doesn't work when the book is in the present tense like that.

I might read the sequels cause I think this book set up some interesting plot points for the future, but I probably won’t do that for a while.

I've realized that I can't read high fantasy books as ebooks. If I can't flip through the physical book to look at the maps and things, I need a good narrator to keep me engaged. I listened to the sample of the audiobook and hated the narrator, so I will need to acquire a physical copy. And I wasn't enjoying it enough to justify buying it, so I just won't be finishing this book until I can get a physical copy from a library. I'm hoping I'll enjoy it more when I do.