 Aiden Thomas's Cemetery Boys was one of my favorite books of the year in 2021, so I'm not sure why it took me so long to pick up Lost in the Never Woods, his gorgoous, YA, modern retelling of Peter Pan.
Wendy has basically been surviving since she and her brothers disappeared five years before. She returned after a few months, dressed in strange clothing, with no memories of where she'd been, but there's been no sign of her brothers. She and her parents have avoided talking about the tragedy, and Wendy has come to exist in solitude except for her best friend, just waiting for the day they can go to college and escape the absence her brothers have left. Recently, though, kids have started disappearing, and Wendy has to work harder not to think about those missing months. One night, Wendy is on her way home from work and decides to take a short cut through the woods, despite her parents' warnings against them, and she nearly hits a boy who looks just like the face she's been compulsively drawing for months. Thomas's decision to shift this retelling to Wendy's point of view works beautifully, allowing the author to consider grief and recovery as well as the inevitable transition into adulthood. His curation of that original story, the details he included and those he transformed, are just delightful.
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 Thanks to partners NetGalley and One More Chapter for the digital ARC of Linda Corbett’s What Would Jane Austen Do?. The book is out June 16!
Linda Corbett’s What Would Jane Austen Do? makes great use of its Austen source material, spinning out this romance between an “agony aunt” (an advice columnist) who writes a “Dear Jane” column and a suspense novelist who’s a total Darcy when they first meet. Maddy Shaw meets Cameron Massey on the day she’s fired—via email—from her column, when they’re scheduled to do a radio interview together. This is not a meet cute. Massey immediately gets under her skin with his scorn for Austen and, really, romances in general. Maddy plans never to see him again, and then an unexpected inheritance from a disgraced and distant family member she never met requires her to live in a small English village for a year before she can sell. So, jobless, she moves from London to the country to wait out her twelve-month sentence. But she doesn’t the move as much as she’d anticipated, coming to recognize the charms of life in a small village, even as she’s pulled into running the literary festival that her relative began. And then Cameron shows up . . . This is a sweet, closed-door romance that centers on friendship as much as love, on making one’s own judgments about those around us, and on the virtues of carving out one’s own path. I devoured it! |
AuthorI'm Jen Moyers, co-host of the Unabridged Podcast and an English teacher. Archives
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