Rating: WORTHY!
Read lamely by Cassandra Morris
I started listening to this on an audio book which I accidentally happened upon at the library (try accidentally happening upon an ebook at the library or in a book store! Doesn't work, does it?!). I liked the story (although not the reader's voice) so much that when I saw it on sale at Amazon, I snapped it up and finished reading it in the ebook version.
Tiger Lily is an alternative interpretation of the J M Barrie book about Peter Pan. I guess the all-encompassing and highly-protected copyright of the Peter Pan story is over now, otherwise this book could never have been written, which would have been a real shame.
This story is told by Tinkerbell, but from the Indian "princess" Tiger Lily's point of view instead of Wendy's and Peter's. Indeed, Wendy in particular, but also Peter are quite minor characters, except that Tiger lily falls in love with Peter and feels betrayed when he meets Wendy towards the end of the story, and he effectively cold-shoulders Tiger Lily.
As I said, I started listening to the audio book, but the narrator's childish voice was really hard to stomach, so when I saw the novel on sale at Amazon, I bought the ebook, returned the library audio book, and finished reading it on my phone! It was seriously good. The way the author captures and interprets the mentalities and motivations of the various players, including Tinkerbell, Tiger Lily, Hook, Smee, Peter, and the mermaids is remarkable. The story really drew me in despite the awful reading.
I never read the Peter Pan book, which was actually titled "Peter and Wendy" and was taken from a portion of an earlier story book and transformed into a play and then a novel, and finally a sequel. I only know the story from the Disney movie which I watched once with my kids, but it would seem that the movie followed the book quite closely. Now I confess I'm tempted to read the 'original' book.
Tiger lily was supposedly a princess, although how that works within a native American setting is a mystery. There is a precedent though: Pocahontas was referred to as a princess since she was the daughter of a chief. There was no chief worth the name in the Peter Pan story that I recall, but in this book, Tiger Lily was an orphan who had been adopted by a cross-dressing shaman known as Tik-Tok.
In the original, the only interaction Tiger Lily had with Peter was when he rescued her from the pirates after she was kidnapped. There never was any other relationship between them. In this book, she negotiates with the pirates and is willingly used as bait to trap Peter and Wendy on a rock as the tide rises, so the pirates can drown them (neither Peter nor Wendy can swim). Tiger Lily feels betrayed and rejected by his favoring Wendy over herself, although she's hardly blameless.
It's a pretty good read, which surprised me a bit. I didn't expect it to be so good. There were one or two really oddball sentences, such as this one, which made no sense at all: "I’ll meet you at the bridge, midday, not tomorrow night but the next" They’re going to meet at midday at night? Weird! Those were mere hiccups though, and overall, this was a very worthy read.
