Reviews with content warning for Child abuse - Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook

This is the origin story of Captain Hook
This POV that I never would see as a kid who grew up watching Peter Pan. Like wow. It all makes sense now. Christina Henry wrote this so well. The twists?!! *chefs kiss* hella dark

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andromeda_1998's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I have a weak spot for Peter Pan retelling and I’ve read multiple ones I like. Lost boy is one of the good ones and a close second only to the childthief by brom. I liked that this story was more a prequel to Disney’s Peter Pan instead of a full retelling inspired by the original book. It was different and in a way more accessible. Everyone has seen the Disney classic but most people didn’t read the book. What makes lost boy one of the best retellings out there?

Characters
I loved Jamie as a main character. He is sweet caring, but also morally grey. I would do anything to protect his boys even if that means killing others. I like that he is softhearted but still strong.

Worldbuilding
Neverland is Neverland, it’s magical ik all kind of different ways and I’m
Thankful Christina Henry updated the story. She took out some of the racist elements of the story and she found a way to still stay true to the world Disney put onto screens worldwide.

Story
The story is set before the Disney movie, like i said multiple times before, and has a lot of darker elements. I’ve loved the way this
Books has been written so much! I recommend this book to anyone!

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skylar_cr_wolf's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.75

I know my copy of Lost Boy has a “The Guardian” quote screaming at me that I won’t be able to look at Peter Pan in the same way anymore… But would it surprise someone if I already didn’t?

I liked and still like the story of Peter Pan, a boy who is so determined to never grow up and stays forever 11 years old. However, I cannot find the best words to describe how well I think Henry did in retelling the story from a total different point of view and giving the children Peter takes to his island their own character traits.
This really feels like a beginning of how the story could have, might have and perhaps has actually taken its turn between Peter and his very first Lost Boy.

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desiderium_incarnate's review against another edition

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adventurous dark reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Meine Sicht auf Peter Pan wurde sehr verändert, weshalb die Originalversion viel an Leichtigkeit und Magie einbüßt. Das finde ich sehr schade. Andererseits ist es meisterhaft, wie gut dieses Buch zu der Welt passt.

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isaaah's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

[Rant review]

Peter Pan really is a brilliant villain. I'm obsessed with this concept. I loved his characterization in this book: it was deeply unsettling, frightening even, yet there were moments where I almost felt compassion for him. For the boy that is, essentially, cursed to be alone forever and does everything to not be. Who will never be able to grow past his egocentrical view of the world, will never know the happiness of a kiss, a hug, a mother. A boy who only thrives on blood and on other children worshipping him. Because essentially he -or the island- is like a god, who needs offerings to be satisified. It is deeply chilling and saddening at the same time.

Jamie's (changing) stance towards his relationship with Peter is another thing I loved. We are told he loved Peter once, but we only see him when that love already starts to turn to hate. Yet the memories of the love remain, and those can be just as strong if not stronger than the love itself. The melancholy and sadness of those memories really hit me, thinking back to the times where everything was sunshine and rainbows and finding that everything has changed for the worse. And having to look past those feelings to realize that that person you loved is not the same as you thought them to be. I found it very well conveyed.

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morganish's review against another edition

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dark sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Full disclosure, I was in a rush and needed to read this for a book club, and could only get it on audiobook, so... 1. There might not be things I remember as clearly as if I was just reading. But 2. This was my first audiobook since... middle school!? Just, a really long time. I kind of just want to download all my thoughts about becoming a recent audiobook convert here instead of a review, but I'll do my best to focus on the actual book instead.

Lost Boy is a Peter Pan prequel from Hook's perspective, where Peter Pan is a monstrous, manipulative sociopath. It's a really fantastic metaphor for how abuse, especially abuse of minors, works psychologically by pitting victims against each other, explored in a variety of ways that absolutely pull no punches. If you can hang with that kind of content, I can't really recommend it highly enough, and definitely sets this book at least at 4 stars for me.

But as deeply entrenched as I was in the narrative, there's a particular plot direction somewhere vaguely in the middle of the book that really, really didn't work for me. From a queer lens in specific, it felt like a bit of an oversight how it's handled, though I'm not sure straight/cis readers will notice or think much of it. It soured a lot of the rest of the story in overall enjoyability for me personally. And then, ultimately, the ending felt like it was trying to wrap up and intersect with the canonical version of Peter Pan. This focus on intersection felt like it undermined the story's powerful themes, trying to hit a checklist of events instead of giving Lost Boy the emotional/psychological ending it deserved. For me, these two negative aspects stood out enough to take what was initially a really gripping story and put it in the category of enjoyable for the moment, but not making it into a new favorite.

If you like retellings or tie-in stories about classic children's tales, especially if they shed a new, more adult, darker light on the original, you should seriously consider picking this up. From what I've seen so far, it succeeds at this more than any other retelling I've encountered. However if you're triggered by stories that realistically explore how abuse works, I definitely would advise proceeding with caution. And I'd also say if you have no tolerance for stories that don't consider/make space for queer interpretations of certain kinds of plot devices or storylines, this might not be the story for you.

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grisgrisgris's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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booksthatburn's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

LOST BOY is a nuanced and grief-filled portrayal of gaslighting, death, loss, and manipulation where it becomes unmistakably clear that Peter is the villain.

This shines both as a retelling and as an original story. Peter Pan is an interesting starting point for retellings because he and his story (at minimum) offer opportunities to either play up the wonder of childhood and the adventure offered by the island or to explore the darkness in having a place filled with fear and violence but little protection which generally requires magic to leave. This is unabashedly of the second ilk and there the story is the strongest. It's a book about kids slowly losing their innocence and breaking more and more until the grief and disillusion force them to literally grow up as they stop believing in the person who promised to let them play forever. That promise carried within it poison, a threat from the beginning as "can" play forever twisted into "must", and every wave of glorious games brings with it pain and death. Play isn't play if you never get to stop, and games don't stay fun when there's always the same winner. I love Jamie as a narrator, his voice strikes just the right balance of sounding jaded with enough room to lose even more innocence before the story is through.

I have two major criticisms but neither of them were enough to make me dislike the book as a whole. The rest of this review will contain minor spoilers, but the spoiler-free version of my critique is twofold: Firstly, I think the way the loss of hands is handled changes the original (animal attack) backstory from one of misfortune to one of malice. It stinks of ableism in a way that makes me uneasy, but I don't have the perspective to know for sure if it's a problem or just kind of odd. Secondly, it misses the mark in its attempt at fulfilling the time-honored Peter Pan retelling tradition of playing with gender in interesting ways. The way it chose was jarring and ultimately boring.

Read LOST BOY for a story where growing up feels like breaking by inches, and everyone Jamie tries to protect becomes another way to hurt him.

The idea that the person who would eventually become Captain Hook

first spent a very long time chopping off other people's hands at first was intriguing, it has a "what goes around comes around" feel to it. But what happens instead is that the combination of those mutilations and how sickness is treated by Peter it makes it clear that any kind of imperfection is not only not tolerated, but it makes the person boring to Peter and his boredom is deadly. It seems like on this aspect of abuse the book gets so close to saying something powerful and then just doesn't. The fact that when Jamie was cutting off the hands of every First Mate they then lost that title establishes the pirates as similarly intolerant of this particular physical weakness. Narratively this leaves room for something really great where Jamie is able to be Captain in the end even after losing his hand. However bound up in the idea of the villainous Captain Hook having only one hand is the ableist revulsion at the idea of someone with one hand. When given the opportunity to turn this premise on its head, LOST BOY instead accepts the loss of Jamie's hand as part of the process of Peter turning him into a monster for the future Lost Boys to revile. Ultimately I don't know where I land on this because the endpoint is known: it's a Peter Pan retelling and so Captain Hook is seen as a villain and has one hand. I just wish this said more along the way.

There's a lot of cool ways to explore concepts of gender in a Peter Pan story, especially one which has the title of "Lost Boy" so prominently displayed.

To me, "actually one of the lost boys is a cis girl" wastes that potential space of exploration, especially when the reveal is based on physical characteristics. I'm torn between two reactions. On the one hand, Jamie's instant embrace of Sally's identity and accompanying pronouns has just enough tension between whether to call her "Sal" or "Sally" that it shows that internal struggle of adjusting to a friend's name change without making it about him. If she had told him her name and pronouns in confidence or something it could have been if not great, at least a lot better. The text makes it clear that she considers "Sally" to be her real name and was masquerading as a boy because she thought it would be safer (according to the text, she wasn't wrong, at least where non-Peter dangers are concerned). My problem with this portrayal is that the pronoun switch happens as soon as he glimpses her chest, whereupon he begins using "she" and "her" then asks her real name. It turns what could have been a cool moment into one that feels transphobic because its very framing and execution ignores all possibility of transness in a moment ripe for it. The book erases implicitly the possibility that Sal could have remained Sal to everyone, let alone other possible combinations of identity and revelation in an island that's supposed to only be for boys.

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