Sisters of the Neversea, by Cynthia Leitich Smith

It sure was fun to revisit Peter Pan's Neverland in Sisters of the Neversea, by Cynthia Leitich Smith  (Heartdrum, June 2021)!  It plunges headlong into reworking the original racist and sexist story, and although it didn't quite work for me, I appreciated and enjoyed it lots! (And it had the added poignancy of a lovely cover by the late, great, and sadly missed Floyd Cooper). 

Wendy Darling and Lily Roberts are stepsisters, tremendously close to each other.  Wendy's site of the family is white, from England, and  Lily's is Muscogee Creek.  They share a little brother, Michael, who they both adore.  But Wendy's dad is moving back to New York city, taking Wendy with him, and the girls are terrified that their family won't survive.

Enter Peter Pan, looking for his shadow, accompanied by his fairy friend, Belle.  

Peter plays Wendy and Michael like the expert manipulator he is, and they fly off with him to Neverland.  Lily sees through him, but can't let her siblings go off with out her, so she follows after them on her own.  When they reach Neverland, Wendy and Michael are taken in to the community of the Lost Boys, and Lily finds the other Native kids.  Soon Wendy realizes that Peter Pan is a tyrannical braggart, and that Neverland, though it is a place of wonders and magic, is no place she wants to stay.  Belle the fairy is herself having grave doubts about Peter, who, having defeated his pirate nemesis, is savagely killing the native fauna for sport and to show off.   

But the Darling-Roberts family is up for the challenge of finding their way home again, and even Peter, in the end, finds a most unlikely family.

There's lots to like here, most notably the power of family.  The bonds between the siblings not only held them together, but tied all the threads of adventure and magic into a moving story.  And it sure was great to see the problematic issues of the original destroyed!

One aspect of the didn't work for me was the style in which it is written.  There are frequent authorial intrusions, and some jarring ways of talking about the characters that threw me out of the story--at one point well into the book, for instance, Wendy is referred to as the "Darling girl."  Additionally, there were many point of view shifts amongst the primary, secondary and even tertiary characters.  Some were simply brief flashes, others lasted for longer chunks, and quite a few included back-story thoughts, and this made the story flow a little roughly for me.  I don't like it when I'm constantly made aware that an outside person is telling the story; it makes the characters feel more like puppets than part of a reality I'm absorbed in (wondering, as I type this, if introverts are bothered more by intrusive narrators than extroverts?)

That being said, this is definitely worth a read! (Kirkus thinks so too, for what that's worth....and their review appreciated "the wry voice of the omniscient narrator."