In World War I-era England, a young woman confronts the horrors of her childhood that others tried to sanitize as children's stories and make-believe games in Cynthia Pelayo's It Came from Neverland, a dark reinterpretation of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan.
None of the constables or doctors believed Wendy Darling when she told them what happened to the boys who have gone missing around London, so she was sent to Bedlam, a hospital for the mentally ill, then to Marigold House. Now grown, she works at Marigold teaching children orphaned in the war or whose parents can no longer support them. But Wendy still checks that the windows are locked, haunted by the memory of a being called Peter Pan. Then a student goes missing, and Wendy suspects that Peter has returned. Along with the brothers from whom she has been estranged, Wendy must face the past she was forced to deny.
In her reimagining of Peter Pan, Pelayo (Children of Chicago) fully embraces the sinister potential of the original, exploring the implications of what happens to Lost Boys when they grow up. Battles with pirates that sound like an adventure in a children's book become a waste of young life more pointless than anything in the trenches. This Peter leans hard into Barrie's description of children as "heartless," yet the heart-wrenching struggles of Wendy, both in flashbacks and her present, to reconcile her love of Peter and for the other children in her care, give this horror story profound emotional depth. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library