Reviews tagging 'Rape'

Lost Boy by Christina Henry

8 reviews

lilredhead's review against another edition

dark emotional mysterious sad tense fast-paced

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

5.0

After I finished the book I needed a bit of time to reflect. Lost boy was the first book I read by Christina Henry, and I picked it up because I read some other fairy tale retellings and was curious about this one. I went in completely blind. 
This book has blown me away, I honestly feel like this book would "downgrade" all the other books I rated because to me, nothing I read so far compared to it. 
Let's just say, I am Hooked 😉
The story has great buildup, it is written as if Jamie retells the events, so immediately it has a bit of a somber vibe to it, but nothing too drastic. The start of the story really feels like a boy who starts to realize certain things with the mind of a boy. Throughout the story, however, this boy-mind slowly grows into the mind and thoughts of a man that has seen a lot. 
The story is also more gruesome than I anticipated, although it's not written to be graphic persay, all the gruesome parts have a quick follow-up of bittersweet feelings. There's quite a few characters and I developed a deep love for all of them (except you, Peter). Reading how they navigated their life on Neverland, the relationships they had, and the things they lost, really hit home.
I finished this book so fast (for me) but still had to put it down a few times to process the things that happened 😅
Jamie is a wonderful character to follow and in some ways I really related to him. 
He did not deserve what happened to him.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Gore, Murder, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Child death, Death, Blood, Grief, and Abandonment

Minor: Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Rape, and Death of parent

peeshpish's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional sad 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

3.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Bullying, Child abuse, Child death, Death, Emotional abuse, Gore, Physical abuse, Toxic relationship, Violence, Blood, Grief, Death of parent, Murder, Gaslighting, Toxic friendship, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Chronic illness, Domestic abuse, Medical content, Medical trauma, and Fire/Fire injury

Minor: Alcoholism, Cursing, Gun violence, Misogyny, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Trafficking, Kidnapping, Abandonment, Alcohol, and Sexual harassment

jaynerynm's review against another edition

dark fast-paced

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

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Violence

Minor: Rape

unicornofblue's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional mysterious sad 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

3.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Bullying, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Death, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Physical abuse, Sexism, Violence, Blood, Vomit, Kidnapping, Grief, Death of parent, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, Gaslighting, and Toxic friendship

Moderate: Animal death

Minor: Rape

aely's review against another edition

dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-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

4.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Child death, Death, Emotional abuse, Gore, Toxic relationship, Violence, Blood, Grief, Death of parent, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, Gaslighting, Toxic friendship, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Terminal illness, Vomit, Kidnapping, Stalking, Abandonment, and War

Minor: Alcoholism, Cursing, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Medical content, and Alcohol

darkty's review against another edition

adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

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

3.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child death, Death, Blood, Death of parent, Toxic friendship, and Abandonment

Moderate: Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body horror, Child abuse, Child death, Domestic abuse, Death of parent, Gaslighting, and Abandonment

Minor: Gore, Rape, Violence, Kidnapping, Grief, Murder, Gaslighting, and Toxic friendship

storyorc's review against another edition

dark 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

3.0

Failed to follow through on the promise of nuance in the toxic friendship between Peter and Jamie but this Peter Pan beats out all the little horror movie dead girls for scariest child antagonist. The sense of dread grows and does not relent.

Pan lore purists, this is not for you. Works best as a prequel to the Disney or with only a faint memory the original.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Violence, Blood, and Toxic friendship

Moderate: Sexism and Abandonment

Minor: Bullying and Rape

booksthatburn's review against another edition

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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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal death, Child abuse, Child death, Death, Domestic abuse, Gore, Torture, Violence, Blood, Grief, and Murder

Moderate: Ableism and Death of parent

Minor: Rape

CW for major character death (graphic).