A review by vader
Second Star by J.M. Sullivan

adventurous lighthearted medium-paced

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

2.0

Wendy woke up feeling like she'd slept through a nightmare. When she saw she was in a makeshift bed with heavy tree roots dangling from the roof of a hole in the ground, she realized she hadn't dreamt it - she had survived it.

I feel so let down. What is there not to love about this premise? A sci-fi retelling of Peter Pan? Sign me up! Sounds amazing!

But once you read it... it's not that great. While the writing as a whole wasn’t bad, the text is juvenile - more for a middle-grade audience than for young adults. The novel sticks very close to the source material, making it incredibly predictable. The pacing was too slow at first, and then resolved everything in the last 20% of the book. All of that is annoying, but not unbearable.

The things that were unbearable, though... they can be summed up as two issues, but they are huge, and they completely break the story:

1) The insta-love: the main couple know each other for only a few days, yet by the time the crew goes back to Earth, they declare thesmselves in love. It’s obvious that they are not even through what the text itself shows: they only find the other attractive. Every aspect of their attraction is superficial.

Now, I would buy it if they were younger, if they were 15 year olds, but one of them is almost 20! I’m not even sure how old the other's supposed to be, but he’s well past the age of declaring himself in love with the first girl who visits his planet. Absolutely none of that made me believe that Wendy’s mature enough to lead a military mission of that caliber, nor that Peter is a hardened street kid, so frankly it would’ve been far better if the romance was saved for the latter books. The addition of a third party as another love interest to set up a love triangle that will probably haunt the sequels just makes matters worse.

2) The stjarnins: turning native americans into “wild” humanoid aliens was a bad idea when James Cameron did it in "Avatar", and it’s a bad idea when you’re retelling Peter Pan. The native people, while stripped of their humanity, still carry their stereotypes, unfortunately: they are savages, their faith is primal, they are not as intelligent as the white folk, and they are (I kid you not!) like “early (read: primal, uncivilized, brutal) humanity”. Hooke himself says so: “The Stjarnin are a savage people, much like early humanity. Even their faith is primal. They worship of a deity passed down from stories and drawings.” (from Chapter 24, “The Crew is Carried Off”). This isn't even presented as the sayings of the villain, no, this is what everyone seems to believe, because nobody ever says otherwise.

Oh, and they make human sacrifices. Yeah. Well, they sacrificed each other at first, but when they noticed they could kill others, they started to hunt British humans instead. Mmhmm.

Absolutely none of this needed to be part of the story. Anything could’ve been done to evade this racist narrative. These aliens could’ve been humans that had arrived to Neverland and gotten stranded before Hooke’s crew. There could have been aliens living with humans, and they could have been “civilized” (there was no reason, other than the racist notion that natives = savages, to make them like this).

That part of the story could’ve been left out entirely, and Tiger Lily could have been a girl on either crew. She could’ve been a “lost girl”. She could’ve stayed with Hooke. She could’ve gone with Wendy and gotten kidnapped by the pirates later. There were a thousand different ways to avoid this anti-native mess, and yet the story still went on this way.

That was my biggest disappointment, and that’s the primary reason why I’m giving Second Star such a low rating and why I won’t be picking up any further books in this series.

Thank you to the publisher for giving me an ARC of this ebook. All stated opinions are my own.