It's a Jumble

There is a boy outside her daughter’s window. Wendy feels it, like a trickle of starlight whispering in through a gap, a change in the very pressure and composition of the air. She knows, as sure as her own blood and bones, and the knowledge sends her running. Her hairbrush clatters to the floor in her wake; her bare feet fly over carpeted runners and slap wooden floorboards, past her husband’s room and to her daughter’s door. It is not just any boy, it’s the boy. Peter.     A.C. Wise’s debut novel instantly pulled me in with these evocative first lines. “The horror-tinged feminist Peter Pan retelling I never knew I needed,” says one of the blurbs on the back of this book (by writer Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam), and that is an apt description indeed. This is a fabulously dark and gorgeous reimagining of the Peter Pan story, one that goes to surprising places. And though Neverland, in Wise’s telling, is indeed magical, Wendy’s life as an adult in the real world of post-World War...