Looking For a Good Book

With high school graduation just around the corner, Peter is eager to move on with the next chapter in his life and maybe learn more about himself and his adoptive family. But while at the amusement park, Wonderland, Peter has an encounter with his fencing rival, Jillian Hook. The two get into a scrabble and fall through a funhouse mirror and into a strange world.

Peter is off, looking for his sister, Alice, but talking cats and pirate ships in the sky will thwart his search.

I was drawn to this book because a) I’m a sucker for anything in the Alice in Wonderland world, and b) the concept here is really kind of brilliant. [And c) that’s a pretty awesome cover.] Tossing Peter Pan into Alice’s world (and presumably the next book will have Alice in Peter’s world?) seems like such an obvious mash-up I don’t know why it hasn’t been done sooner.

That said, I did have a slight problem with the character of Peter here.  He’s not quite the Peter Pan we know from the J. M. Barrie book or play. He’s familiar, but different. More modern?  He’s the opposite of the boy who doesn’t grow up as he’s excited to grow up and move on. And without that ever-youthfulness about him he’s not Peter Pan, even if he’s fighting Hook and dealing with Smee and Starkey and so forth. So, it’s more than a mash-up, it’s a modernized mash-up. But I think that’s one step too far.

I actually didn’t need all of Peter’s original foes (and, yeah, I didn’t like this Hook being female). If Peter is in Wonderland, I want the wonderland world to be his background, his marvel, his foe. What’s the point of being in Wonderland if it’s only the background that changes?

Still, the concept is high enough that I mostly enjoyed the read (it drags a bit in the middle) and am definitely interested in reading the next book.  But overall I think it misses the mark.

Looking for a good book? Peter Pan in Wonderland by Jeni Conrad is a great idea but really just modernizes Peter and changes the setting for a familiar story.

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Peter Pan in Wonderland

author: Jeni Conrad

series: Mirror Islands #1

publisher: Independently Published

ISBN: 9798393303587

paperback, 332 pages