With “The Lost Girls” (Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $23), author Laurie Fox needs readers to suspend disbelief early on, and she offers a captivating premise that makes it easy to give in. But the reward for such complete surrender is less than satisfying.
Wendy Darling comes from a long line of women who swear they have been visited in adolescence by Peter Pan. Just like the three children in the J.M. Barrie fairy tale, the Disney classic or the Mary Martin musical — take your pick — the Darling girls each learn to soar to Neverland with Pan, an awkward sprite of a boy.
The twist in Fox’s novel is that each generation of Darlings falls madly in love with Pan, and it ruins the women one by one.
Wendy’s great-grandmother is locked up in a hospital in London, where she frequently talks about flying and is considered by doctors to be a danger to herself. Wendy’s grandmother has been missing for decades. And Wendy’s mother, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., becomes a flaky, hippie-ish writer of self-help books with titles such as “The Pan Pathology: Refusing to Grow Up and Other Ungenerous Traits.”
As the narrator, an adult Wendy quickly lays out the plights of these women before sharing her own experiences with Pan.
By the time Pan introduces himself to a young Wendy, he has ditched his green tunic and tights for a T-shirt and a pair of distressed Levi jeans. The combination of modern-casual fashion sense and an ability to fly is irresistible to Wendy. But young love withers away after Pan fails to return to Berkeley and Wendy starts to grow up.
Unsurprisingly, thoughts of Pan begin to infringe on Wendy’s adult life, throwing a wrench into her roles as wife and mother, and creating a conflict between past and present.
The plot holds great promise as a lesson in letting go, or as a chance for readers to escape from the mundane and get in touch with their whimsical, romantic sides. But Fox never fully delivers on either one.
More and more, Wendy’s memories sound like delusions, causing the reader to wonder whether the suspension of disbelief was necessary after all. There is no suspenseful turn, no surprise ending, no ambiguous answer that would compel readers to rethink their interpretations of the book after they have finished it. Instead, Fox steers her story into a more clinical realm, where emotional issues are blamed on bad parenting and the pressure of being an adult. Consequently, the whole feel of the book changes as the plot unfolds, ungracefully shifting from delicious fantasy to light beach reading and, finally, to family melodrama.