Wendy Darling Review

Holy Hell where do I start with this book. I think in fairness I have to tell you that I adore everything to do with peter pan, the books, the Disney, the merch, the movies EVERYTHING. So, it doesn’t take a lot for me to gravitate towards peter pan items but it has a high expectation to live up to and oh boy it didn’t just live up to it – it exceeded it.

For those that lived there, Neverland was a children’s paradise. No rules, no adults, only endless adventure and enchanted forests – all led by the charismatic boy who would never grow old.

But Wendy Darling grew up. She left Neverland and became a woman, a mother, a patient, and a survivor. Because Neverland isn’t as perfect as she remembers. There’s darkness at the heart of the island, and now Peter Pan has returned to claim a new Wendy for his lost boys…

Wendy, Darling takes us to a Neverland that has become coated in dread and unveils the darkness at the heart of Peter Pan. It’s the horror-tinged feminist Peter Pan retelling I never knew I needed. A.C. Wise has taken a story where the women have remained in the background and brought them to the forefront, weaving the perspectives of Wendy, her daughter, and Tiger Lily in a brilliant re-imagining of a classic boy’s club story.

This is up there with my favourite dark retellings and I would liken it to Disney’s retelling of The Wizard of Oz, Return to Oz and believe me when I say that it is an amazing thing. It is dark, mysterious, magical and the perfect fairy tale for adults.

There are some very dark moments and I don’t want to spoil it for all of you so I will only bring up one. In the opening scene of the book Peter is scolding Wendy for becoming a grown up before absconding with jane who he then keeps referring to Wendy – miles away from the loveable and energetic boy figure from my youth but amazing all the same.

I was expecting Pan like this

but in this book he is definately more like this

This book literally gave me goosebumps and the hair stood up on my neck with both delight and also the feeling that something just isn’t right with Pan the man. I really empathised with Wendy and spent a lot of the book wanting to hug her and tell her everything would be alright, even though I wasn’t entirely sure it would be.

It will be no shock to know that I couldn’t put this down and I actually finished it really quickly I intend to read this many more times and I will probably end up annotating this book. Deliciously creepy and highly recommended. If I could give it more than 5 stars I would but this is a very high 5 star read for me.

The Women of Troy Review

I was provided The Women of Troy by Pat Barker as an ARC through NetGalley in return for an honest review. All opinions are my own and thanks is extended to the author, publishers and NetGalley for allowing me to do so.

Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home victors, loaded with their spoils: their stolen gold, stolen weapons, stolen women. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails.

But the wind does not come. The gods have been offended – the body of Priam lies desecrated, unburied – and so the victors remain in limbo, camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed, pacing at the edge of an unobliging sea. And, in these empty, restless days, the hierarchies that held them together begin to fray, old feuds resurface and new suspicions fester.

Largely unnoticed by her squabbling captors, Briseis remains in the Greek encampment. She forges alliances where she can – with young, dangerously naïve Amina, with defiant, aged Hecuba, with Calchus, the disgraced priest – and begins to see the path to a kind of revenge. Briseis has survived the Trojan War, but peacetime may turn out to be even more dangerous…

I thought The Women of Troy was good. It’s perhaps not quite as brilliant as its predecessor, The Silence of The Girls, but Pat Barker has produced another well told, humane and completely real story here as she continues the retelling of the fall of Troy and its aftermath through the eyes of Briseis, once Achilles’ Prize of Honour and who is now married to Achilles’ friend.

The events here are documented in many texts such as the Aeneid, the Iliad and so forth however Barker has an ability to convey the experienced that her characters are feeling, going through and so on in a special way as well as building up atmosphere and allowing the reader to feel like they are there in the thick of the setting and the storyline which could still be relevant in today’s society.

Maybe because the story is so well known I didn’t find it impacted me as much as some of her other novels and so it is a 3 star read for me.