Betwixt and Between

September 2, 2013
In an impressive debut, Stilling deconstructs the body of lore surrounding Peter Pan, reimagining Neverland as an in-between place where boys who die too soon wait until their loved ones are ready to heal and move on, with Peter as their immortal leader and ferryman to the After. Ten-year-old Preston Tumber eats a poisoned cookie and wakes up in Neverland. While his grief-stricken parents attempt to find closure in the real world, the man accused of murdering Preston is quickly sent to prison. When Preston’s best friend is likewise poisoned, the boys realize their killer is still at large, and Preston vows to find a way to cross the boundaries and save their last living friend. Meanwhile, flashbacks unravel the true history behind Peter’s relationship with Winifred, aka Wendy Darling. Stilling’s take on this familiar tale is provocative and poignant, rich with emotion and powerfully described, laced with profound contemplations about dying too soon and growing up too quickly.

September 1, 2013
Peter Pan revisited. Stilling reimagines the world of the children's classic, and all of the familiar characters and places are here, including the Darlings, the Lost Boys, Tinker Bell, Captain Hook, pirates, cowboys, Indians, Neverland and early Edwardian London. Stilling even introduces J.M. Barrie as a character. But this is revisionist Pan, for the novel begins in the modern world with the murder of a child in Massachusetts. One afternoon, Preston Tumber visits Gregory Hawthorne, a strange neighbor, and is offered a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. Out of politeness, he reluctantly accepts the gift, but on the way home, he experiences a seizure and dies. He wakes up in the here and now of Neverland and becomes one of the Lost Boys. Meanwhile, his parents are grieving, yet they find their grief somewhat mitigated with the arrest of Hawthorne, who protests his innocence. A few weeks after his arrest--and before he's brought to trial--he's killed in prison. Shortly after this, a new Lost Boy arrives in Neverland, Peyton, who is Preston's best friend. It seems as though he, too, was murdered, and obviously not by Hawthorne, who died several weeks prior to Peyton's death. Meanwhile, in turn-of-the-century London, young Winifred Darling has a serious fall and faces a difficult recovery. In her delirium, she seems to have visited Neverland and to have met young Peter. Back in 21st-century Massachusetts, a game's afoot, as there's obviously a murderer of children on the loose. A revisionist reconstruction that never quite works due to the jarring disjunction between fantasy and reality.

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Starred review from November 1, 2013
After 10-year-old Preston is murdered, he wakes up to find himself in Neverlandyes, that Neverland, for he quickly meets Peter Pan, the leader of the Lost Boys. Soon the reader realizes that Neverland is a kind of limbo and that the Lost Boys are children who have died in the real world and are waiting to go to the place called After. As this is happening, the story shifts to two others: that of Claire, Preston's grieving mother, and that of the Darling family living in London in 1901. Winifred, the Darlings' 15-year-old daughter, injured in an accident, slips into a coma and, like Preston, wakes up in Neverland, where she is dubbed Wendy and the traditional Peter Pan story unfolds. Meanwhile, something happens that proves the wrong person has been convicted of murdering Preston and the boy is desperate to return to the real world of Before to set things right. But can he? Author Stilling manages her three linked stories and their juncture neatly and does a lovely job of re-creating a numinous Neverland and of making Peter a betwixt and between, neither quite human nor quitewell, something magically else. At turns happy and unbearably sad, Betwixt and Between is a beautifully realized reimagining of a classic story that will enchant readers as the original did.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)