I have kind of given up on the 3rd iteration of my Reread Project. There were a few reasons, it was my 3rd time around and I was running out of things to reread. My experience with Creator by Jeremy Leven was kind of shattering, that was a book I never wanted the suck fairy to visit, and it visited that book...HARD. Then I got bogged down with Julian May's Saga of the Exiles, which always seems to crash and burn in the 3rd book for me.
So, I looked at the shelves in our library and thought there were all these books that either I, or my wife, have bought and intended to read, but one of us never has. I decided to go through the library alphabetically (I may miss the occasional letter, there aren't many authors whose surname starts with Q for instance) and find one of these long neglected tomes and read it, then talk about it here.
My first choice was Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson
This is not a biography of Michael Hutchence's daughter, but a sort of a prequel to Peter Pan.
It's probably best described as a YA fantasy romance, but there's a bit more to it than that.
The book is curiously narrated in first person by Tinkerbell. This was an interesting choice, and it allowed the author to give the reader little previously unknown facts about the lives and habits of the Neverland faeries, as well as Tinkerbell's life pre Peter (her father took off with a faery called Belladonna, which is interesting as they normally keep the same partner for life).
Mostly it is however about Tiger Lily. Jodi Lynn Anderson had to play around with canon here a bit. Tiger Lily isn't a Native American, she's a member of a tribe indigenous to the island, although she's not really one of them either, she was found by a character called Tik Tok, who was a sort of shaman and adopted into the tribe.
Because she doesn't act like the rest of the tribe, Tiger Lily frequently finds herself on her own exploring the island and that's how she meets Peter and his gang of boys, the Lost Boys, which is not how they're referred to in the book.
Peter seems to have a strange fascination for all the women that cross his path. First Tiger Lily, then Tink and lastly Wendy. He also had some sort of relationship with at least one of Neverland's mermaids.
It initially becomes a love triangle, which later turns into a square when Wendy arrives, and there's also the presence of Maeryn (the mermaid) lurking around on the fringes.
Recently it's become rather popular to portray Peter as a rather sinister, manipulative character. I;m sure the temptation to do that was there for Anderson, but she doesn't really. He's definitely not heroic, he's dangerous, boastful and fairly self obsessed, but he's a young boy who never grew up. If her origin story is taken, unlike the rest of the boys, he got to his current age (she describes the main characters of Tiger Lily, Peter, Wendy and the boys as being around 15 - 16, which doesn't quite ring true to me. I've always seen them as closer to 12, and their behaviour is more like pre teens than 16 year olds) without any external influence. They can remember other people and some of their behaviour is influenced by that. Peter's isn't. So he's best described as careless.
Cat Valente said in her wonderful Fairyland series that all children are heartless, because their hearts haven't had time to grow and develop, and that's Peter to a tee. He doesn't think about anyone other than himself, because he's never had to do so.
Aside from the relationship between Peter and Tiger Lily, which is beautifully and lyrically described and written, it also comes across as a very real portrayal of young affection between characters who are still developing physically, mentally and emotionally, there's a side story about Tiger Lily's tribe and how they lose a sense of what they've always been, especially the tragic Tik Tok, due to the intervention of the well meaning Englisher Phillip. Oh, and I found Anderson's versions of both Smee and Hook very interesting and different.
I wouldn't put this in my top books for the year or anything like that, but I did enjoy it and it was a pretty decent start to the project.
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