Let's get Lost in the Never Woods

 

So, as I’m writing this, I think out of my entire bookshelf, there are two books that I haven’t actually read. I’ve read everything else and it’s wild. But today, I’m talking about Lost in the Never Woods by Aiden Thomas, author of Cemetery Boys, one of my favourite books of all time.

The blurb says that five years ago, Wendy and her two brothers vanished into the woods. She was the only one who returned. Now, children are starting to disappear – and the townsfolk are coming to Wendy for answers. Desperate to flee her past, Wendy encounters Peter, a boy she thought lived only in her imagination, who begs for her help to rescue the missing kids. But in order to find them, Wendy must confront what’s waiting for her in the woods.

So in the first chapter, it’s Miss Wendy’s eighteenth birthday, she’s a volunteer in a hospital as she’s trying to become a nurse, and this girl Ashley, that Wendy had actually seen that morning, has gone missing, meaning that two kids had gone missing in twenty-four hours. Wendy learns this because her bestie, Jordan, tells her, trying not to ruin her eighteenth birthday. Wendy has also been drawing pictures of Peter Pan and a singular tree without realising it herself. But then by the end of the chapter, she’s hit Peter Pan with her truck, and honestly? Good for her. Although, at this point, she only suspected it was Peter Pan, didn’t actually know. In the second chapter, they’ve moved to hospital, and the police try and question her since she was the one who called 9-1-1 to bring him to hospital. He does wake up briefly and tells her he finally found her. We also learn that Wendy and her brothers went missing five years prior, and only Wendy was found, so she’s riddled with guilt that everything is her fault. But then she ends up in the woods again, and Peter Pan asks her to help him find his shadow, because when she looks, it’s just gone.

This was one of those books that I knew Aiden Thomas had written, but for whatever reason, I just never got around reading it until now. Since most of what I read is queer romance, since I knew this didn’t really fall under that, even though I bought the book, it took me a long time to get to reading it. This comes especially since the vibe I got was that it ended up being some kind of mystery, specifically around Peter Pan and Neverland, since homeboy is rapidly aging and losing his ability to fly since his shadow is gone. And I will say, I tend not to read fantasy all that much, and even less do I read re-tellings of classic tales and fairy tales.

This book is near 400 pages, and I think something that comes with the territory of mysteries is that it has to take some time to rev up. And I’d definitely say that’s what happened with this book. I do recognise that not every book is on 100 from the go (thankfully), but it took me about 100 pages to properly get into this. When I say that, I mean that I was sort of feeling like things were actually starting to happen. But saying that, this book is that mystery kind of vibe where you’re aware that there are things happening, and you have to keep reading on to actually get explanations and figure out what’s really going on.

Something I appreciated was that, about 200 pages in, the narrator tells us that Wendy had no idea how to go about solving a mystery, and that she felt like she had been dropped into an episode of Scooby-Doo. I mention this because as I was reading, I did feel like Wendy wasn’t really doing much for a lot of the book, and even though she was trying to find these lost kids and help Peter with his shadow, all she’d really ever do was wander in the woods and ignore her family and Jordan. I don’t know, it’s this weird mix of me wanting her to be more active, while also recognising that there wasn’t really much that she could do. So, while I wanted more to actively be happening, I wasn’t really sure what could have happened. And to go back to my previous paragraph for a moment, where I said it took about 100 pages for things to get going, I’d say this book moves pretty slowly as a whole, and that is in part due to the fact that Wendy doesn’t do a lot until towards the end.

Then I’ll give this book that the last 70 pages or so is when it really goes into turbo charge go mode. This is the part of the book where everything comes to its head, and you start getting explanations and resolutions for things. And I’ll give it that when this was happening, it was good, and was definitely the strongest part of the book – for me, at least. Throughout this whole book, even though Peter starts younger than Wendy and then ends up a similar age to her, you can tell that there’s this underlying romantic undertone that comes to a head in these last pages. There’s this really good thing of where they could be together, but if they were, they would be taking away something from the world in one way or another that’s vital. Like, if Wendy chose to go to Neverland, she’d run the risk of restarting everything that she worked to fix throughout the book, and if Peter decided to stay in the real world with Wendy, he’d be taking himself away from Neverland. I’m not going to spoil the ending, but those are the three choices – Wendy goes to Neverland, Peter comes to the real world, or they stay apart.

I think when it came down to it, reading this book made me realise that maybe I’m just not particularly a fan of the genre. With the mystery aspect, it just all moved so slowly. And I already knew that I wasn’t the biggest fantasy fan, I don’t know what it is with fantasy, but it needs to have a specific vibe to it for it to hit for me. But all that being said, I’m still a fan of Aiden Thomas as a writer, and his style of writing. I mean, I loved Cemetery Boys and really enjoyed The Sunbearer Trials. I really do think that for me it was the genre that I wasn’t a fan of, and that’s okay.

Okay, bye!