Cover of The Lost Girls

The Lost Girls

Wendy has long heard the family legend — madness strikes the Darling women at a certain age, traditionally after romance visits in the form of an overgrown boy. The Darling girl will fall in love, the boy will desert, and the girl is left on her heels, heartbroken and flirting ever after with lunacy's lure. Wendy knows she should be grateful for her childhood adventure, but instead she finds herself adrift; resenting the heartache-turned-eccentricity of her mother; envious of the oddball antics of her Great-Nana; and consumed by the mystery of her grandmother Jane, whose disappearance following her own youthful romance remains unsolved.

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When Wendy falls in love with Freeman, an exuberant and irreverent man-child himself, she finds herself perpetuating the pattern she thought she had missed. And then along comes her daughter, Berry, the precocious but sullen child with the eyes of a sage. When it is Berry's time to go off to The Neverland, Wendy, like so many mothers before her, questions who she has become. Is she "barking mad"? Is Berry?

Wendy's journey to self-realization takes flight from the themes suggested in the classic novel Peter Pan.Fox's dazzling prose and elegant insights into love and loss make this story universal; the characters and their heartache make this novel deeply personal. The Lost Girlscontemplates the contradictory human yearnings for freedom and safety, flight and stability in a moving and ultimately uplifting story of motherhood, love, and reenchantment that speaks to women of all ages.

Audience
young adultadult
Length
medium · 288 pages

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  1. Other Oceans Shares peter pan, fantasy, fairy tale
  2. Wendy Shares peter pan, retelling, fairy tale
  3. Always Neverland Shares peter pan, fantasy, retelling
  4. Another Pan Shares peter pan, retelling, fantasy

“People who read The Lost Girls tend to reach for these next.”

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  4. Never After

“If you want more of the same (fantasy), start with these.”

  1. The Fire Rose
  2. Dewitched: The Untold Story of the Evil Queen
  3. Skipping Midnight
  4. Letters to Zell

“If it was the peter pan that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Forsaken Dreamscape
  2. Captain James Hook and the Curse of Peter Pan
  3. Hook & Jill
  4. Pan

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

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  2. A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter
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