These Deathless Shores by P.H. Low introduces a new genre-bending retelling of Peter Pan retelling where Peter is the villain. The story follows two former Lost Boys of his who return to the Island to kill Peter and kidnap Tink because she's the source of an addictive substance known as Dust.
First off, I really loved how this version of Peter Pan treats the Island as its own sentient character with its own will and POV. I’ve got to say, the writing in these sections was so utterly breathtaking and poetic, and this is where the book truly shined for me.
However, there's a vagueness in the worldbuilding that bugged me. We get hints of political conflicts and a new pantheon of gods in the Outside world. However, I wish those elements had been either cut out or fleshed out and elaborated on more because the worldbuilding as it stands feels muddled and half-baked.
On top of that, the characters and their romances unfortunately felt flat and underdeveloped for me. Perhaps the only three-dimensional character of the bunch was Chay, the current surrogate mother of the Lost Boys, who goes to desperate lengths to stay on the Island.
Lastly, I wasn't a fan of the excessive use of epigraphs every few chapters, quoting modern books like Six of Crows. One, I found this incredibly distracting and it kept pulling me out of the world. Two, I feel like Low's writing is so achingly gorgeous on its own that they don't need to rely on the words of other authors. Heck, having little bits of lore about the Island or the Outside used in the epigraphs instead might've been a nice touch.
Thank you, NetGalley and Orbit, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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