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This review has n o s p o i l e r s! I gave this book 2.75 stars, but I didn't think the story was terrible. I actually found this book pretty entertaining.
Summary:
So this book is a Peter Pan retelling with a beach type twist and a love triangle. We follow the main character in first person so we know everything she's thinking. Wendy Darling has lost her two brothers 9 months ago. People say that they're died while surfing a dangerous swell, but she thinks that they're only missing, still chasing the next wave. The story begins after Wendy has just graduated high school and is starting her summer before college. She's at a beach bonfire with her best friend Fiona and Fiona's boyfriend Dax. Wendy leaves them not in the mood for celebrations and walks along the beach until she sees a surfer. Well, she decides to go into the water and he nearly takes her head off when he takes a wave and that's how they first meet.
Wendy still hasn't let go of finding her brothers and using clues from when they were around she becomes very determined to find them. While driving along the coast she sees the surfer again and follows him to a hidden beach hoping it's somewhere her brothers might have been. When they meet on the beach, they finally get introduced to each other and the i n s t a r o m a n c e begins from there!
This book is a bit darker than the original Peter Pan and is full of ups and down and back and forths and after a while I couldn't decide what was what until I got to the end.
Review:
There were a couple of things I did like which was how quick this read went. The pace was very very quick and there were no slow parts what so ever. That made the story pretty entertaining for me despite the craziness of it. It did follow most of the plot points in the original Peter Pan, also, the names basically stayed the same. The characters were enjoyable in my opinion. The two boys were cute and nice and classic. Belle was a badass but kinda a bitch too, though in the end she wasn't all that bad. Wendy... Is just someone you need to read to get the whole picture. Now, that's about all I liked about the book.
Things I didn't like start with how LUDICROUS the instalove was. I mean I expected it what with it only being 250 pages, but wow. It's like it only takes a few hours to fall in like and 2 days to fall in love. Woah. I was laughing through most of those parts thinking "Oh my god, there's no way this is believable." Another part I didn't like was that this was almost like a bad version "We Were Liars" by E. Lockhart in a way. I can't say more without spoilers but I did find myself making comparisons as I was reading. And "We Were Liars" is one of my favorite contemporaries. One more thing I didn't really enjoy was how utterly unsatisfying the ending was. I didn't feel enough closure. There was some closure, but just not enough to satisfy my questions. It was so abrupt that I think maybe 10-20 more pages would have done some good.
All in all, this really was just a read for fun for me. I wanted a small break from young adult fantasy and I got it with Second Star. It was brilliant, but it wasn't bad. If you really like the story of Peter Pan I say give it go! I mean it's so short and so quick to read you're really not losing anything.