EVERLAND

With London crippled by bombings and a deadly disease outbreak, Gwen Darling and her siblings, Joanna and Mikey, are bent on just surviving until they find a way out.

Besides the demolished state of their home, they face serious obstacles, the loss of their parents and the city’s other adults being just one. They must also evade Capt. Hans Otto Oswald Kretschmer—Hook for short. Hook and his army of Marauders go about snatching up the bombings’ survivors for experimentation for a cure for the Horologia virus. Those taken by Hook never return. One day they snatch Joanna, and in Gwen’s quest to rescue her sister, she joins forces with a fearless boy named Pete and his equally bold friend, Bella. The question then becomes: will this team, together with the Lost Boys, be enough to outsmart and outrun Hook and his German army and rescue Joanna without putting any other lives at risk? This reimagining of Peter Pan tries too hard to hold on to key elements of its inspiration to succeed on its own, and the hand of the author is sadly evident. Repetitive conversations unnecessarily lengthen the story, and the romantic subplot seems clumsily tacked on. The characters are fickle and impulsive in ways that feel designed to ensure that readers never forget that they are children.

With predictable plot twists, this story is unoriginal in ways that have nothing to do with the fact that it retells a classic.