Review: Tiger Lily

Cover Summary:

Before Peter Pan belonged to Wendy, he belonged to the girl with the crow feather in her hair. . . .

Fifteen-year-old Tiger Lily doesn't believe in love stories or happy endings. Then she meets the alluring teenage Peter Pan in the forbidden woods of Neverland and immediately falls under his spell.

Peter is unlike anyone she's ever known. Impetuous and brave, he both scares and enthralls her. As the leader of the Lost Boys, the most fearsome of Neverland's inhabitants, Peter is an unthinkable match for Tiger Lily. Soon, she is risking everything—her family, her future—to be with him. When she is faced with marriage to a terrible man in her own tribe, she must choose between the life she's always known and running away to an uncertain future with Peter.

With enemies threatening to tear them apart, the lovers seem doomed. But it's the arrival of Wendy Darling, an English girl who's everything Tiger Lily is not, that leads Tiger Lily to discover that the most dangerous enemies can live inside even the most loyal and loving heart.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Peaches comes a magical and bewitching story of the romance between a fearless heroine and the boy who wouldn't grow up.


As a stand-alone novel, this book is wonderful. As a companion to Peter Pan, however, it does not quite work.

This is not the Neverland of the book. Not because it's so much darker, because it's really not. If you've read Barrie's work as an adult, you will notice that Hook's vendetta against the children is truly disturbing, that the Lost Boys have trouble finding enough to eat, that they enjoy killing pirates far too much, and that Peter's "innocence" leaves them in danger of being abandoned or forgotten at any time. These things are the same in Tiger Lily; unfortunately, the magic that makes Neverland so alluring despite the darkness is sadly diminished. Ms. Anderson takes a lot of liberties with the setting and characters, so much so that they are barely recognizable: Tinker Bell can't speak (except to readers as the first-person narrator) and therefore cannot be her snippy, feisty self with Peter; no one can fly; the English arrive in Neverland by a series of convenient shipwrecks; the Lost Boys are teenagers with the hormones to prove it, including Peter; and the ending - though I won't spoil it - is deeply objectionable to any fan of the original. The only thing I really liked about the setting was its solution to the mystery of aging in Neverland: its inhabitants stop aging at the most defining moment of their lives. This is why the pirates grew up, but the Lost Boys didn't. It's ingenious, and results in some very interesting reflections about life, death and change.

Several characters from Barrie's work were reinterpreted, a procedure that was rather hit-and-miss. James Hook was a hit for me; seeing him as a child laborer who lost his hand to a machine, and whose gentlemanly affectations are all self-taught, makes a lot of sense to me. There is such a theatrical quality about him to begin with, and such a desperation, that the two versions of him mesh well together as adaptations are supposed to do. Smee was a miss; he is supposed to be an innocent, pathetic character who cannot be dangerous if he tries, not a Jack-the-Ripper-style psychopath who dreams of strangling young women. Tiger Lily and Wendy were misses too; while I like Ms. Anderson's Tiger Lily much better than Mr. Barrie's, as a far stronger and more complex character, I believe the author (in the form of Tinker Bell's narration) was rather unfair to Wendy in comparison. It's as if their roles in Peter's life were reversed: in the original, Tiger Lily worships him, while Wendy is the one who takes him down a peg when he needs it. In this book, Tiger Lily is praised as the independent warrior, while Wendy earns quite a bit of undeserved narrative hostility for being too feminine and too submissive towards Peter. Most girls can sympathize, I'm sure - we all worry too much about not fitting in with the feminine ideal, and envy girls who we think can do it - but I don't believe we should be worrying so much. I don't believe there is any "wrong" way to be a woman. To be fair, that might also be what Ms. Anderson was trying to say, but the message didn't quite come through.

I wish she had written about a real-life aboriginal tribe instead. It might have meant a little more research, but I'm sure she could have pulled it off. The scenes in the Sky Eaters' village were by far my favorites, especially those involving Tiger Lily's adoptive father, a crossdressing shaman who calls himself Tik Tok in honor of a clock that washed up on the shore. He is a very wise and compassionate person, and the advice he gives to Tiger Lily about being proud of who she is is something every parent should tell their child. When she bitterly remarks that the other villagers find her ugly, he replies: "They do, but we are a small village, and we have narrow tastes. Who knows how many other people in this world would find you beautiful?" Moon Eye and Pine Sap, Tiger Lily's friends (insofar as her reserved nature is capable of friendship) are also very likeable. The way in which Phillip, a shipwrecked Englishman, disrupts the Sky Eaters' society with his Christian beliefs are sadly reminiscent of North American history. Ms. Anderson does not hesitate to bring several shades of gray into the conflict, since neither side has any bad intentions, but things still spiral into tragedy.

Finally, the language was off. I realize that Neverland is timeless, but if you are going to have your characters live in tribal settings, travel in sailing ships, work in shoe factories during childhood and carry a colonialist attitude towards the Natives - let alone a fairy narrator, for goodness' sake - you just cannot have them using words like "fan", "goner", "hi" and "okay". Next thing we know, we'll hear Peter Pan wearing baggy pants, using an iPod and referring to the Lost Boys as "dude".

Not a pretty picture, I know, but there you have it. If you've never read Peter Pan, please read this, as a thoughtful and original coming-of-age story in an unusual setting. But if you have read Peter Pan, the more you love it, the more you should steer clear of this.