I usually write my reviews immediately after reading the last page. But, this one needed digesting. The more I meditated on what I read, the more I appreciated the story. Days later and I’m still thinking about it.

This book was a bit dark and real and I loved that, but I would check the trigger warnings prior to reading if you have concerns. This isn’t a bedtime story. It’s raw and it hurt at times. To remember what it was like to be a child, and also to remember what it felt like to slowly (or quickly) have that taken away from you. To want to hope and to dream and to play and instead have to grow up into a world like ours.

What I wish more than anything is that I wouldn’t have known Jay was Captain Hook beforehand. In a perfect world, this would have been advertised as a pre-quel to the Peter Pan we know in love with an origin story for the characters on the island. The reveal at the end would have been devastating.

I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

This book had such a promising premise. I really wanted to enjoy it, but ultimately I had a really hard time with the writing style. The first person voice is really weak and I found myself a bit confused by the way it jumped back and forth in time. I have to say I don't care for the "my mom insists I marry well even though I'm not really interested but I am doing it for my younger sibling" trope that I find is coming up a lot in historical fiction. Rosie was generally cute but also quite precocious. The story picked up once they Lou got to Neverland, but I would have loved to see her get there a little faster. Overall, the book was a fine read, but I wish it had been slightly more condensed and streamlined.

Review will be published on Instagram on 03/24

I absolutely enjoyed the writing style. Her way to build the environment and feelings around the reader and draw them in was very well done. I thoroughly enjoyed how she was able to coax the reader to empathize with Lou, and immerse the reader into her narrative and her point of view. The moody atmosphere definitely showed the themes of depression/melancholy, but unlike other books that talk on the subject, it did not bog me down or make me put the book down because I was too caught up in the bad emotions.

But, I was able to put the book down for the first half of the book. It took a long while for things to actually start happening. After we finally go to the world of the lost, I was hooked and finished the rest of the book in one sitting.
There were a lot of morally grey characters, which is not really expected when thinking about a group of mainly children. Immortal children, but children non the less. A huge theme of the book is having a found family, and it was nice to see a story focusing on sibling type love instead of romantic. Sibling squabbles but also being there for each other because they are a part of your found family.

Trauma is also touched on, but mainly to showcase that trauma can look like so many things. Looking perfect on the outside doesn't mean that everything is okay on the inside.

I do wish that some things were foreshadowed a bit more in the beginning and middle of the story. How the perceived villain(Peter) acts at the end kind of comes out of nowhere and his character doesn't seem to match up with what we know from earlier in the story. His motivations were not at all hinted at until you find out at the very end.

Other than that, the ending was beautiful and took the reader to a satisfying resolution for Lou's story. I very much enjoyed her journey through what she forgot, and how this reminiscing brought new perspective about the people she loved.

Review in progress and to come.

I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley and am voluntarily leaving a review

This one is a difficult book to categorize and rate. It takes the story of Peter Pan and turns it to the dark side, exposing the shadows and the dirt and the true hardness that comes from saving "lost" children and bringing them to an island of dreams and nightmares.

We start with Lou, a young girl that adores her father, is wild, and never quite fits in with what her mother wants. She feels a sort of freedom with Jay, her friend that comes in through the window (and always seems to be causing trouble between Lou and her mom). As she grows up, Jay is forgotten when Lou turns her attention to her sister Rosie and starts turning toward a life rife with the expectations of others as to what she should be.

Lou ends up on the island that Jay is from, and is drawn into a journey to find a way back home, to Rosie. She is at odds with Jay and the other lost children. To find her way home, she ends up trying to find Peter, whose magic controls the island and who is the only one that knows how to reach the stars to leave and return to the world Lou belongs to. As she journeys, her memory is slowly slipping away, forgetting what she is trying to do, or who she is trying to find. And Jay is trying to fight back against Peter, for all the wrongs he puts at Peter’s feet. For all that he feels for Lou, and how he even sees himself as part of the island.

I don’t want to give away anything, but as you move through the story, it just gets darker. You start to realize how evil and good are maybe sometimes the same thing. How methods may differ, but the end result is the same. How one lost person can either find themselves and free themselves or lose themselves entirely.

In the end, I was left adrift. Lou’s story was finished, but Jay’s was really just taking off. His is the story of the evolution of a villain. Hers is the story of a lost soul trying to find a place to belong.

*I received an ARC from NetGalley and the publisher to review. All opinions are my own.

4 stars

What a fantastic read. Hook as a child…
👀
This was written beautifully and I loved how Raccio made this her own story.

Captain Hook as a child? That was enough to get my heart racing. As said in the description, most of the time, you do forget that he was once a child himself. Captain Hook wasn't always a man with hatred in his heart. He wasn't always a man with a vendetta towards a child. I often thought he was so angry with Peter because he had missed out on enjoying his childhood to the fullest and took out that rage on the prankster who he was meant to spend eternity with. I never thought of the WHY behind his anger, or potential jealousy.

The story first follows Lou, as you learn more about her character, you find that she was a rambunctious child who just wants to live. She wants to fight pirates and play in the dirt. Young, and not being able to fully express her emotions, she witnesses changes in her parents affection towards her. Jay comes in, helping Lou feel less lost in this big world. They become best friends, and spend Lou's childhood together, playing in the woods, fighting pirates, and just being with each other. You also learn a lot about Lou as an adult as she struggles between wanting to make her mother happy and wanting to be herself. While I normally do not like flash back chapters, Vanessa Raccio made me wish there were MORE. The way she wrote them and the places she put them in the story just fit so well. I didn't feel like I was going down a path in memory lane, the flashbacks felt like they told another story within the original. With the mingled perspectives, you really learn more about the characters and their thoughts, and feelings. You really get a good sense on why the characters are the way that they are, and the pieces all fall together towards the end to complete the puzzle.

This story made me feel things. It made me remember things. The feeling of growing up faster than I had anticipated. Feeling lost, and unsure. Even though this is JUST a story, I did find myself pulled into the emotional aspects more than I thought I would. I connected with the characters in ways I didn't think possible. While following their journey, I felt like I went through a journey of my own. This may be my first book that I have read by Vanessa Raccio, but it will not be my last.

Big thanks to Netgalley for providing me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

First of all, I'd like to say thank you to NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I really, really wanted to like this book. The concept and the story were good, and I love a fairy tale retelling, but the way it was written really took away from this for me.

A lot of the writing was really overdone, a lot of description for description's sake and not adding anything to the story. In fact, sometimes it was too excessive and made the events that were happening unclear. The characters weren't unlikeable, but they were mostly flat and didn't make me want to root for them at all. A lot of the dialogue felt clunky and disconnected - the switch between using and not using contractions for the same character, even within the same conversation, made it feel really unnatural.

I know that the "melancholy" or depression was meant to be a big overarching theme in the book, but it was too consistently depressed. Without moments of levity or lightness, the big dark moments didn't have the same impact that I think it could have.

Overall, I liked the story, the journey that Louisa and Jay take is lovely, but the book fell flat overall for me.

First I would like to say that I am honored that I was approved to read this book. I saw it was a retelling of a villain origin story and jumped in with both feet. I might have gotten ahead of myself and thought there would be a romance, I'll blame my romance author brain for that one completely. I loved this book despite there not being a romance, like I said I jumped the shark there (or maybe the croc?). What I tend to let myself forget every time I read the retelling of a villain origin story is that the character is supposed to be a villain come the end of the tale. Though with this one, as the last one I read, I think the characters are more nuanced than just hero and villain.

This take on Never Land is brilliantly well done in a way that I did not realize what was happening until the very end. I'll avoid expanding on that because I do not want to give spoilers, but the original Peter Pan story seems to be a backdrop to framework the mythology that Raccio built for this retelling. Peter Pan is still not the completely likeable character from Disney's reimagining of the tale, but he does have moments where you can understand why it is he does what he does to Jay and the other Lost. Doesn't mean I like him though. I honestly liked Jay a bit more until you start to see him coming apart at the seems and his own desires start to matter more than those around him. I still love Jay, and this retelling only makes me want to give him and Captain Hook a big hug. Though again, that might be the romance author in me trying to see all the good in morally grey characters. We all do that, right?

Louisa has a struggle that I'm sure a lot of first born women, or those raised women, have experienced. Expectations and duty can put a strangle hold on your person and make you feel like you have to be perfect for others rather than your own vision of what is perfect. She grew up too fast in order to be an older sibling, a feeling I know rather well, and then lamented not getting to go back to the childish way of seeing the world. Death of her father also contributed of course, but it is hard to tell whether her father, Rosie, or Jay were the ones that offered her the greater safe haven. It's something that I feel each reader has to discover for themselves. Especially when it comes to whether or not they can forgive Jay for what his selfishness ultimately did.

Subtle things broke me a little here. Like how we see the twins respond to Lou, how Lou, like every other person that is in Neverland for long, starts to forget things once she embraces the Island and what that does to her. For such a strong personality like Louisa, how could that possibly do anything but cause her more pain? And then there was figuring out who sweet and gentle Sammie was going to be in the story. Once I figured that out about halfway through the book I wanted to pluck him out of it and protect him. Which I think is the point. Each character here is damaged in a different way, except maybe Slightly, and it makes you want to know what happened and give them the support that they never had. Except from the very twisted Peter who is damaged in his own way.

Vanessa Raccio does a fantastic job at revealing her twists and turns. The prose is a little flowery at times, but it reminds me of writing that would have been written at the time this work is set in. The jumps back and forth in time are expertly done to show us the different sides of Lou and in seeing Jay's point of view we realize that things are more complicated than they seem. None of the Lost are completely without flaw, though Sammie might come the absolute closest. Then Henry.

I stayed up late to finish this one too. I wanted to know how this Island worked, what the rules were, what was ultimately going to make Jay into the person that captained the Jolly Roger. If you like villain origins that make you want to hug the villain, historical fiction with a sprinkle of fantasy and whimsy, and don't mind getting in your feelings with the ending, I highly recommend this one. You forget that you're reading a villain origin and it makes you want for things to turn out differently. Just like Jay wanted too. Buckle up, remember those games of pretend you played as a child, don't let yourself get Lost, and settle in for a Peter Pan retelling and Captain Hook origin that will make you wonder about fairy tales and children's stories all over again.

This peter pan retelling was so so good. This was a totally new look at at it and it was done to perfection. I lovedbit so much!!
I just reviewed Light of the Second Star by Vanessa Raccio. #LightoftheSecondStar #NetGalley
[NetGalley URL]

To be honest, I do not know what to think. So, I’m going to split my thoughts being the good and the bad.
The good:
- This book is written beautifully. The author has a good pace to her story-telling that makes you understand each scene and imagine each description very clearly. I loved her story-telling and how she managed to smoothly shift from one plot to the next.
- The story itself is beautiful. It’s a very vague retelling of Peter Pan. Very vague, as in she uses the Peter Pan story as her base but adds a twist to it that makes it its own story.
- The characters are complex. I got way too invested in Louisa. She showed the naivety that we all have as children but eventually grow out of the older we get.
- Charles Webber, the father, is a dream of a character. He was more of Lou’s salvation than Jay was. Yes, he had his flaws but that was fine because he supported his daughter as much as he could.
Now for the bad:
- I do not see the reason behind having Jay’s point of view to understand why he hated Peter. I think it was pretty clear that losing Lou was hard for him but having 8 chapters dedicated to why Jay did what he did was a bit excessive in my opinion.
- I understand that Jay is a kid and is a bit immature to understand that it was time to let Lou go, however, it absolutely broke my heart to read how this book ends. The other kids had nothing to do with the trouble that Jay and Lou have caused. It makes me sad to see Henry dying for no reason, Sammy scared watching Jay change, and the twins crushed as Jay didn’t care one bit that Henry was gone.
- I think there was a bit of confusion when it came to how much Jay was willing to sacrifice for Lou. As the book progressed, it was clear that Jay loved Lou and her lose was hard on him, but it was also clear how much he loved is crew as well. He showed multiple times that he was not willing to lose any of them to help Lou. Even allowed her to trek to the Hanging Tree on her own. I understand his anger towards Peter, but it didn’t make sense to me that at the final hour, he completely loses his mind and rather kill his own brothers than be without Lou. In fact, I think he would have been happy to see that Lou was returning to her life.
- Can we talk about why Lou died? Nothing in the story ever hinted that Lou could die unless the author wants to hint that this entire story is about a daughter that considered herself so unloved that she made up an imaginary friend to help her cope with the fact that her mother never loved her. So when she got older and practically had to sit through her mother trying to sell her off, she decides to commit suicide by drowning in the forbidden lake. Louisa only finds peace after Peter explains to her that she never understood that her mother didn’t hate her, but that Anne Webber was flawed. Her mother could not understand her daughter and therefore decided to replace her instead of trying to help Lou.
- I don’t understand how she found her peace and how that all correlates to the sequence of events that turns Jay bad and Peter good and Lou dead to be honest.
Would I read another book by Vanessa? Yes, absolutely. I could not put the book down. I recommend this book to anyone that wants to rack their minds and question whether what they are reading is a fictional novel or a theoretically novel that depicts the mind and how it creates stories that help us cope with our own demons.

One of the most beautiful, haunting, exhilarating books I have ever read. I could not put this book down, and I became thorouggly immersed in the island and the lives of Lou, Jay, and the lost children. The entire novel is threaded with the promise of both freedom and doom. Raccio breathes life into complex, vivid characters, and weaves a story of monsters, courage, loneliness, what it means to be free, and what is means to be loved. There is magic and adventure, but more importantly there is friendship, family, lost innocence, and madness. Morality and reality are slippery here, giving the story a wonderful tension and urgency.

I was given the opportunity to read this as an ARC (thank you NetGalley!) but I plan to buy a hardcopy once it is released. I reserve five star reviews for books I find truly remarkable, and this deserves every star. I went into this book anticipating a fun villain origin story. This book is so much more. Raccio's prose took the story to another level. Her writing is poetic yet clear. She pulled me into the island and up to the stars. I am reminded of 'Lord of the Flies' in how it left me so transported and emotionally charged. The impact of this book is even more pronounced because of the wonderful depth of the characters and how much I fell in love with them. It also has that special magic that only ever exists in Neverland.

A book that stands out from the crowd. The characters and the setting are written exceptionally well.

Light of the Second Star
By Vanessa Raccio

Disclaimer: I was fighting a fever throughout this read. The world may never know how that affected my opinion.

First, the part I really enjoyed: the writing style. Ok, maybe it strayed into a little too flowery or descriptive at times, but it certainly immersed me in the world. It sweeps you right up into the moody atmosphere. Part of that is the “melancholy” (depression) which is a big theme.

I can’t say I felt very strongly about any of the characters and I think that came down to what felt like some inconsistencies here and there. But at the same time, I felt like I really understood each of them.

This book is filled with morally gray characters and a big found family theme. Childhood and loss of childhood. And the Peter Pan characters are completely turned on their heads. You hate Peter but you understand his actions a bit as well.

This is not a romance, and it has quite a trigger warning list which I will copy from the author/publisher below.

Thanks to @netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

Content trigger warnings: Amputation (not explicit), anxiety, attempted rape, blood, death, depression, homophobia, infertility, mention of child abuse (not explicit), mention of incest, pregnancy, sexism, sexually suggestive content, suicide (not explicit), violence.

As a child I dreamed of running away to never never land to get away from all my pressures and pain. This book exquisitely encapsulates that. It is superbly written and pulled me in from the first chapter. I could not put it down. It is a story about friendship, love and being lost. I have never seen depression so perfectly described as by this author. I am so thankful for netgalley and the publisher for letting me read an advanced copy. This book is unforgettable, beautiful and deeply felt.

I received an arc copy of this book. Thank you to Netgalley.

This wonderful twist on a fairytale was a lot heavier than I was expecting when I picked it up. From the beginning, Louisa makes a hole in your chest and stays there for the entire book. The writing was magical, heavy, and so emotional at times I needed to put my book down.

From Jay, who was all sorts of flawed, to Peter, who was evil and then wasn’t and then maybe was again, to Benji, who was sweet and kind from beginning to end, the author gave us phenomenal characters.

This book was excellent and definitely isn’t your run of the mill retelling.