Jess G. Reads
- Mar 30, 2021
- 3 min read

Review: Lost in the Never Woods by Aiden Thomas

Updated: Apr 25, 2021

Rating: ⭐✨⬜⬜⬜

Title: Lost in the Never Woods

Author: Aiden Thomas

Genre: YA Fiction/ Historical Fiction

Author Info: He/They

Setting: Astoria, Oregon

Month Read: March, 2021

Book Type: Ebook- ARC

Publication: 2021

Pages:384

*Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

TRIGGER WARNING-

Anxiety/ Grief/ Missing Children/ Gun Violence/ Abduction/ Trauma/ Kidnapping/ Neglect/ OCD

"He was stardust and the smell of summer."

No Spoiler Summary:

Lost in the Never Woods is a Peter Pan retelling set in Astoria, Oregon on the day Wendy Darling turns 18. Her brothers have been missing for 5 years, and she had been missing along with them- but trauma has blocked out her memories of the event.

When Peter Pan shows up and she realizes he is not just the fictional boy from the stories she and her mother used to tell, it is up to Wendy and Peter to team up to stop his shadow from kidnapping more children in town.

Wendy has to juggle this secret mission with maintaining her family relationships, her relationship with her best friend, and getting ready for college while volunteering at the local hospital.

Will Peter and Wendy be able to capture his shadow and put it back where it belongs with Peter? Will she find out what happened to her and her brothers all those years ago? Will the new missing kids be found safe and reunited with their families?

Review:

I'm not going to lie- I really wish I could get the four or five hours I spent reading this book back. It took me a while to figure out why I didn't like it so much, and then I realized it was really bad, seemingly unedited fanfiction about late teen Peter and Wendy.

There wasn't enough romance or intrigue to keep me invested in their relationships, and Wendy's parents were borderline neglectful and emotionally abusive. Wendy is a horrific best friend, and most of the first... couple hundred pages are Wendy and Peter meeting up in different locations to have (almost) the same conversation over and over and over again.

I also thought we'd go to Neverland, (or at least somewhere a bit more magical) but we spend the whole novel in Astoria, Oregon and in a very non-magical forest. Wendy keeps dreaming and drawing a tree, which led me to believe it would be this giant, fantastical, magical tree-- but... no. It's just a tree. It is part of a reveal, but not one that was satisfying at all.

If you want to read this, I'd maybe read the first few chapters, and then skip to the last hundred or so pages and you won't miss much, if anything, at all.

Some other problems I had were the fact this book was way too long for the amounts of action, drama, and suspense that were actually in the book. The weird chapter titles seemed out of place most of the time, and sometimes I didn't get why they had the titles included at all.

I also couldn't get over feeling like this book was written by someone whose never actually been a teenager, and who hasn't had actual parents since Mr. and Mrs. Darling were bad, bad, bad caricatures of a checked out grieving mother, and an overprotective, grieving father.

Everyone in this book needed a therapist, and I don't understand how two of them worked and volunteered at the hospital without anyone telling them maybe they needed some help.

Some things I loved are the cover (it's absolutely gorgeous), and some of the writing was VERY, VERY beautiful. Aiden did a great job of making me feel like I was in Astoria- I could see the waterfall, feel the grass, and never wondered what some locations looked like.

I wish more of this could have transferred into the dialogue, the character development, and the plot.

Recommendation:

Disney retellings I enjoyed would include:

A Whole New World by Liz Braswell (Aladdin)
Heartless and the Cinder Series by Marissa Meyer (Alice in Wonderland & Cinderella)
Fairest of All by Serena Valentino (Snow White).