Unhooked by Lisa Maxwell

 

After the strangeness that was Orlando, I decided to take a brain break with my next read and indulge in something fun. I decided on Unhooked by Lisa Maxwell. This young adult fantasy novel promised a dark retelling of Peter Pan on the inside flap, so I was excited to see how it would compare with some of the other Peter Pan retellings I've read in the past. Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson is a particular favorite of mine. I was hoping for something similarly mysterious and thoughtful here.

The plot of the novel follows a teenager named Gwendolyn Allister. As the story begins, school has just let out and she is moving to a new house in London with her mother. Her best friend Oliva has come along to help out, and both girls are looking forward to spending the summer together. On their very first night in the new place, however, things go terribly wrong. A group of terrifying winged monsters appear, kidnap both girls, and magically transport them to a different world. 

They are immediately separated upon arrival into this new place. Olivia is nowhere to be found and Gwen is taken captive onboard an old-fashioned pirate ship led by a handsome and mysterious captain. The captain soon reveals that Gwen has been brought to Neverland and he is none other than the Captain Hook from the classic story. Gwen doesn't believe him at first, but as she is surrounded by unexplainable things like flying monsters and fairies, she comes to realize that the captain is telling the truth. Things in this Neverland are different from the story she remembers though, and she soon becomes involved in a dangerous quest to rescue Olivia from the clutches of Peter Pan and save Neverland itself from imminent destruction. 

I am usually pretty biased in favor of Peter Pan stuff, but sadly, I did not love Unhooked. The beginning was promising enough. I thought Maxwell did a nice job setting a dark and foreboding tone upon Gwen's arrival in Neverland, and the Captain was enough of an anti-hero type to keep me interested in his story. As the plot went on though, I began losing interest rapidly and never really recovered. I think there just wasn't enough Peter Pan content in it for me. Aside from the setting and the character names, almost everything else was different, and not in a way that I found compelling. It became a pretty generic dark fey story, with plot points that made less and less sense the deeper I got into the book. The universe building felt haphazard, the magic system felt underdeveloped, the romance was rushed, and the story felt disjointed. The twists didn't grab me and the ending was odd. The final few chapters in particular contained a few events that were bafflingly unrealistic, and I say that as a reader fully willing to suspend my disbelief and accept the existence of Neverland without batting an eye.

On top of all that, Gwen's character was a grab bag of all the tropes I hate the most in young adult fiction. She was unbelievably naïve, misunderstood everything the first time around, was instantly and unexplainably attractive to all the main male characters, fell in insta-love, and was a "chosen one" destined to save everything. I didn't really enjoy reading about her, so that impacted how much I could enjoy the story overall.  

It's been about two weeks since I finished reading Unhooked, and already all I have left is a vague recollection of a messy dark fey plot and a heroine that was frustratingly dense. So obviously, this was not a new favorite. It was not completely terrible, but it just really wasn't for me. The young adult audience this was written for will probably like it. As it stands now, I'm just happy to have cleared another book off my shelves and have another novel to bring to my classroom library. 

Challenge Tally

Clear the Shelves 2021: 21/50 (donate)

Total Books Read in 2021: 44