Month: March 2025

Lost in the Never Woods, by Aiden Thomas

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In this retelling of Peter Pan, Wendy Darling lives in Astoria, Oregon, a small town where children have begun disappearing. People turn to her because she and her brothers also went missing five years earlier. She has no answers because when she did turn up in the woods, she remembered nothing of what happened. Michael and John have never returned.

When Wendy, on her eighteenth birthday, almost runs over a boy lying in the middle of a forest road, she discovers that the Peter Pan of the childhood stories her mother told them is real. He’s left Neverland to recruit Wendy’s help in finding the missing children.

It’s clear that Thomas put a lot of thought and imagination into how to adapt the magic of the J.M. Barrie original to the modern world. I especially like how he characterises the antagonist. Also, he’s done a good job of understanding issues such as grief, guilt, and PTSD. The damage to the Darling family, in particular, struck me as genuine.

Unfortunately, I came near to setting it aside unfinished, despite so much I liked about it and my own fascination with Peter Pan. Only the fact that I was listening to it as an audiobook while doing chores and commuting enabled me to stay with it. So what lessons can I as a writer draw from this Young Adult novel and NYT bestseller?

Go for broke with the cover. The book’s cover is fabulous! It draws you in to the tangled woods with their tempting flowery path and threatening blue and mauve trees. And the mysterious faces in silhouette. Who wouldn’t want to pick up a book with a cover like this?

Take time to describe your main characters with surprising sensory details. The early descriptions of Peter charmed me, with so many wonderful details such as twigs in his hair, the woodsy scents that accompany him, the oddball clothes that he’s picked up in Wendy’s world. I loved this aspect of the story.

Make sure your characters feel like real people. Sadly, after the wonderful description of Peter, he and Wendy, not to mention her family and best friend, come across as one-note characters. This is especially problematic with Wendy, since she is our point-of-view character.

Vary your pacing. The whole story is at fight-or-flight level. Wendy starts the story freaking out and, aside from one or two brief moments of connection, she spends the entire story at the same panicked level. Many Goodreads reviewers complained about slow pacing. I attribute this reaction to the pedal-to-the-metal emotional level, the absence of character development, and the scarcity of actual actions Wendy and Peter take to solve the problem.

These problems could be attributed to a rush to publish a second novel in 2021 after the big success of Thomas’s debut novel Cemetery Boys in 2020. Most writers labor for years on their first novel trying to make it perfect in this difficult marketplace. Then the follow-up doesn’t have a chance to get as much attention.

I’m impressed by Thomas’s productivity. I’m also taking a lesson from the way he interacts with his fans online, from his fun bio to the way he addresses them directly.  Given the very positive reviews for Cemetery Boys, I will give that one a try. I’m also looking forward to seeing how this promising writer develops over his next few books.

What Young Adult book laced with a bit of magic have you enjoyed?

Northern Farm, by Henry Beston

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From the writer-naturalist author of The Outermost House, comes an invitation to share in the daily life of a farm in Maine. I found this book so comforting that I stretched it out over a couple of months, only reading one or two short chapters first thing in the day.

Looking for a quieter life than could be found in the Boston suburbs, Henry Beston and his wife, writer Elizabeth Coatsworth, moved to Chimney Farm in Nobleboro, Maine, in the 1930s and lived there for the rest of their lives.

Published in 1948, the book describes a life I thought long gone: heating with wood, using horse-drawn farm  equipment, finding dirt roads impassable in mud season, gathering for community suppers at the grange, and—most heartening—neighbors clad in red-plaid flannel helping each other out with seasonal chores. Yet when I moved to Vermont a few years ago, I found all this and more. Yes, even horses being used instead of tractors on some farms.

Home again from a visit to friends in town, glad to be back where everything doesn’t come into the house along a wire or down a pipe. What a relief it was to get into my farm clothes and have a reasonable amount of physical work to do!

These chapters, which take us through a single year on the farm, originated as a series of country-living columns in The Progressive. Each starts with a few pages full of closely observed description of Beston’s surroundings and often something of his activities that day. Here is an excerpt from a winter walk.

Then, even as I looked, something touched me on the shoulder with a new awareness, and the scene became transformed. The shadows which were but shadows turned to pools of a deep gentian blue, a color tranquil and serene, and the water, which had been but water in snow pool close beside the shadows, became a mirror of some blue and glowing vault of heaven—this other blue being as pure as the first, but perhaps more bright, and with the brightness a measure more delicate. By contrast the sky beyond both the pool and the winter shadows appeared more green. The sun shone, there was no sound, and there I was standing in the road and staring at two of the most beautiful appearances of color in Nature which I think I have ever seen. Only a ridge of purest white snow separated the shadows from the pool.

 It was as if Nature, in the depth of our winter, had called into being the delicate colors of a garden.

That section is followed by excerpts from his Farm Diary, scraps of details that evoke daily life on the land and in the community. Each chapter closes with a paragraph or two of philosophy, sometimes referencing his lifelong theme of cultivating a closer communion with the natural world.

Who would live happily in the country must be wisely prepared to take great pleasure in little things. Country living is a pageant of Nature and the year; it can no more stay fixed than a movement in music, and as the seasons pass, they enrich life far more with little things than with great, with remembered moments rather than hours. A gold and scarlet leaf floating solitary on the clear black water of the morning rain barrel can catch the emotion of a whole season, chimney smoke blowing across the winter moon can be a symbol of all that is mysterious in human life.

I’ve also been reading Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which many of you have probably already read. She draws on her own Potawatomi heritage and her scientific training as a botanist to describe—beautifully—a way of relating to the land and its plants and trees with respect and gratitude.

Both have been a balm during this terrible time, reminding me of the good in people and what is worth defending.

What are you reading to prepare for next month’s Earth Day?

A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep, by Rumer Godden

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In my search for comfort reads to give me a rest from what’s going on in our world, I’ve turned to Rumer Godden, whose novels are set in earlier times and places. I’m looking forward to rereading old favorites like The Greengage Summer, and in the meantime picked up this memoir of her early life. I completely ignored the note that it covers the years from her birth in 1907 to 1946, thus landing me once again in the experience of a woman at least temporarily distant from Hitler’s reign of terror.

As Godden sets out to trace the beginnings of her life as a writer and her formative influences, one theme that emerges immediately is the contrast between her charmed childhood in Narayanganj—then part of colonial India, now Bangladesh—and her stints in England. In India, where her father worked as a shipping company executive, children were “left to grow” where in England they were “brought up.” When she and her sister Jon as tweens were briefly sent to their aunts, “[f]or the first time we had to live by rules, strict rules.”

Throughout her life in India, she ignored the privileged cocoon of the members of the British Raj in favor of getting to know the local people. As it turned out, she was thus able to store up experiences she later drew on in her novels. Her unconventional attitude sometimes landed her in trouble, such as when she starts a dance school in town. “In Calcutta’s then almost closed society, ‘nice girls’ did not work or try to earn their living.”

She had to start the dance school because her charming but irresponsible husband had recklessly run up debts that ate up all of her income from her surprisingly successful novel Black Narcissus.  She chose to live apart from him for much of their marriage, her struggles as—essentially—a single parent again taking her outside the bounds of convention.

Godden’s prose did indeed carry me away. Her vivid descriptions of people and places and her extraordinary encounters make the story come to life. She also intersperses excerpts from her diary and letters to capture the essence of the moment.

In 1942, with the war affecting Calcutta, she and her children move to Kashmir as an “abandoned family,” meaning the family of a soldier normally stationed in India but serving abroad in wartime. They were more abandoned than most, since her husband spent all of his pay on himself and couldn’t be bothered with them. The place where the British government housed them in Srinigar was rife with disease, forcing her to take the children first to a houseboat and then to Dove House, a dilapidated building isolated up a steep mountain path.

The path went up to a knoll where a gap in a baked-earth wall served as a front gate; inside the wall spread a garden of terraces and fruit trees which led to a rough lawn and there, set so perfectly that it seemed to nestle into the side of the mountain, was the house. It was built of pink-grey stone with a wooden verandah and a roof of wooden shingles. Beside it the stream fell from terrace to terrace and in front, rising almost as high as a gabled window in the roof, was a magnolia, one of the slender kind that would have white flowers and purple buds.

Their life in Dove House is extremely primitive, since she has almost no money. But in fact that is where she learns the difference between her circumstances and the true poverty of the local people. For example, when winter finally turns to spring, she is so enchanted by the blossoming almond trees that she breaks off a spray to bring home, eliciting a frown from her gardener/car.etaker

“It’s only one spray.”

“You do not know what it is to be poor,” said Nabir Das.

Further experiences reinforce this lesson. As once a single parent living in poverty myself, I felt equally chastened. As we teeter on the edge of catastrophe, I draw strength from remembering how much worse it can be and has been. It may yet be, but for now I’m ready to return to the fight.

What comfort reads have you found? What strength have you drawn from them?

The Face on the Wall, by Jane Langton

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Professor Homer Kelly already has plenty on his plate, when his wife Mary presents the part-time sleuth with an important task: find out why her former student Pearl Small has disappeared. Worryingly, Pearl’s husband Fred is negotiating a deal to turn the land, a former pig farm which is in Pearl’s name, into a development of McMansions.

Meanwhile, the Kellys are helping Mary’s niece Annie as she uses the windfall from her suddenly success as a children’s book illustrator to build her dream home, constructing it as an extension to her current house and renting that out. Annie goes all out to make it everything she’s ever wanted, including a 35-foot blank wall where she begins to paint a mural of famous stories for children.

Enter the Gast family. Social climbers Roberta and Bob who rent Annie’s house have two children: ten-year-old Charlene, a self-centered swimming champion, and eight-year-old Eddy, who has Down’s syndrome. Eddy loves to visit Annie and watch her paint. When she gives him some materials to work with, she finds that he is a remarkably gifted artist.

All is not well, though. The Gast parents are embarrassed by Annnie’s artistic eccentricity, and covet her part of the house. Accidents plague the property. Worst of all, a face keeps appearing on Annie’s wall, no matter how many times she and Flimnap O’Dougherty, a strange handyman who showed up one day, paint over it.

And where is Pearl? We learn that she loves her inherited acres and has been turning them into a nature sanctuary, planting trees and flowers.

This thirteenth Homer Kelly mystery is a light-hearted story about art, hubris, and community action. What do we value? What do we owe each other?

There are a few incidents that strain the reader’s credulity, but they fit with the fairy-tale atmosphere of the story. I especially enjoyed mentions of various beloved children’s books, such as Wind in the Willows, and other favorites, such as Three Men in a Boat, and the pen-and-ink illustrations of Annie’s wall. There is also plenty of suspense that builds throughout the story, so that the pages fly by.

Jane Langton, who died in 2018, remains one of my favorite authors. Her children’s book Diamond in the Window has to have been the most influential book I read as a child. I still often think of the adventures in it. What I love about her adult books is the way she weaves a tale that whose charm and humor hold serious questions for those who care to look for them.

Have you read any of Jane Langton’s books?