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Thursday 25 May 2023

The Other Side of Never edited by Marie O'Regan and Paul Kane

 

I received an ARC of this book thanks to NetGalley and publisher Titan Books in exchange for an honest review.

This is such a solid premise for an anthology and I was really excited to read it. It feels like there's been a recent trend of 'Peter Pan but creepy', with my absolute favourite Lost Boy by Christina Henry standing out among the crowd. I am pleased to say that The Other Side of Never is a worthy contributor.

As with any anthology, you get the good ones and the not so good ones. I think this starts off a little weak with many of the initial stories being confusingly told or hard to follow. Sometimes a story would end and I wouldn't get what the point was as nothing had really happened, and these were the most frustrating. But after the first few, the quality improved greatly for me and there were some real enjoyable finds here.

I would say my favourites were A School for Peters (kind of disjointed and not the best told, but I liked the idea behind it) No Such Place (a fantastic thematic interpretation of the source material and one of the easiest to follow) and The Lost Boys Monologues (again, disjointed but had some good ideas behind it).

Overall, I enjoyed this anthology a lot and I am looking forward to reading the Alice in Wonderland one even more so now. I do think that in general, this series of anthologies does need a bit more editing. It does seem to be a consistent problem that stories seem either unfinished or near incoherent, and it is a shame when some of them are so enjoyable. Hopefully they will continue to improve

Overall Rating:

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