“The Never King” is a steaming mess

Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.

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And, uh… wow. Not like a good ‘wow’, just like a slow, eyes-wide, mouth twisted ‘wow’.

So, The Never King by Nikki St. Crowe is a dark romance, why choose retelling of Peter Pan. And I’m not gonna lie, I was excited to read it because the premise was intriguing.

The blurb:

The stories were all wrong — Hook was never the villain. For two centuries, all of the Darling women have disappeared on their 18th birthday. Sometimes they’re gone for only a day, some a week or a month. But they always return broken. Now, on the afternoon of my 18th birthday, my mother is running around the house making sure all the windows are barred and the doors locked. But it’s pointless. Because when night falls, he comes for me. And this time, the Never King and the Lost Boys aren’t willing to let me go.

So, while Peter Pan has been some kind of a staple for me growing up, it wasn’t one of the stories that really stuck with me (potentially because it distantly reminded me of Lord of the Flies and I hated that).

I remember St. Crowe being all over TikTok with this book’s marketing, inspiring a whole host of others to try and copy her marketing tactics. But as with anything, if someone did something successfully, it most likely won’t work out for you the same way (because it’s already been done), and if they try to sell you a course on “This Is How I Became A Raging Success, Here’s How You Can Do It Too”, run the other way. Screaming.

We get this additional explainer of, “The Never King is a dark retelling of Peter and Wendy. If you like your enemies to lovers romance with hot, ruthless, morally gray love interests, you’ll enjoy The Never King and the Lost Boys. You can expect hate kissing, fighting, bickering, and ‘touch her and I’ll unalive you’ vibes” and I feel like this may have been written for social media specifically, with the jail-bot avoiding lingo.

Would it have killed them to change ‘unalived’ to ‘killed’ for the non-social media places?

Petty of me, to harp on this. I know.

But this whole culture of reacting violently to something before having more context irks me, and while I absolutely understand why we have this language (it has to do with the visibility of marginalised groups on platforms, not just jail-bots), I feel like we should be able to have difficult conversations without blowing our tops off.

But I digress.

Our protagonist is Winnie Darling.

Yeah, Winnie like the Pooh. And Darling as in descendant of Wendy. And we meet her just shy of 18 (so, as a minor) having sex with another minor.

Why, why, why, oh, why do we have to put minors having sex on the page? Can we just stop?

In this particular case I think the goal of the minors having sex on the page is to tell us Winnie’s a girlboss because she’s sexually empowered, but there are other ways to do this, we don’t have to put the sex on the page! Not to mention that she comes off as a neglected teenager seeking validation, attention and love through sex, not as someone who’s sexually empowered.

Anthony shoves inside of me and I make the pornstar face for him because I know he likes it. I pretend to orgasm with him. I am not a pornstar, but I am the daughter of a prostitute so I think that’s close enough.

— The Never King, chapter 1

Right off the bat, what I get is major “pick me, I’m not like other girls” manic pixie nightmare girl who is horny beyond all sense. And if you think this description makes her (and this book) as bad as it sounds, you’re be right.

Winnie finds abuse, violence and abduction kinky, tee-hee, and is shocked and/or surprised when she has a normal reaction to it all frightening and odd.

Just chopping off that start of the book would be a good move. Without that, I could let it go a bit more, I could have accepted she’s just that way. But even that doesn’t save us from the stilted dialogue or the overly excessively awful writing.

Because the writing… it’s bad.

There are many spelling errors, fragments, and painful over-use of single sentence paragraphs. It’s also cringey, case in point, “We’re the Lost Boys and there’s plenty of lost pussy to be found”. The dialogue is also pulled out of a cardboard box. People don’t talk like this. It’s hard to believe this was edited at all.

Yes, I get that this is smut over plot and that I shouldn’t focus so much on the plot or writing, but when the writing is excessive and meandering to the point of futility, how can I not?

Then there’s the characterisation of Peter Pan, which has left me with questions.

Yes, again, I get that this is dark romance and smut-before-plot, but centring this whole reverse harem around Peter Pan is an… shall we say, interesting choice.

First of all, ageing up a character that is traditionally a child for the single purpose of writing them having sex is weird (and harkens back to that complaint I had about minors doing it on page). But Peter Pan specifically refused to grow up, and that has always been a central part of his character.

Yet, here he’s all grown up, tatted up, and smoking cigarettes. The whole backstory of Peter Pan has been changed, yet we’re given none of it. How did he grow up? What changed his mind? He doesn’t even cling to a vestige of the original character. What happened? And what’s the purpose of Neverland? Do I have to slog through several books of this ish to find out?

There’s an emphasis on how young the characters in Neverland look, despite supposedly being mature; “He has the youth of a boy, but the presence of a man”.

Is this trying to grasp at some straws of the original premise of Neverland and have them age very slowly instead? But then why the obsession with Winnie’s age, repeatedly stating that she “just turned 18”? Why tell us, over and over again, about how Pan takes the Darlings on their 18th birthdays (further obsessing about being barely legal) and strongly emphasising that they’re all broken?

This just screams Teen porn category.

We do get some hints about how there are seven islands and seven kings, Pan being one of them. And each king claims a shadow and Pan has lost his shadow… this whole world building is skimming the original story but shaking it into a cocktail of I don’t know what.

And, honestly, I don’t care, because nothing about this writing makes me care about any of this.

There’s a brownie, but I don’t know what or who that is, though it seems like it’s relevant to the metal wire plot in here somewhere. And while Pan certainly has a lot of characteristics of a vampire (sleeping in a dark “cave” in a “coffin”.

In addition to not knowing how to be a vampire, he also doesn’t know how to smoke a cigarette. Because he smokes cigarettes like an idiot, ruining every scene he does it in. Early on, we get a whole few paragraphs where we’re walked through how Pan lights up a cigarette, like we’re stupid.

Pan smoking in the corner every time:

What I think it was supposed to be like (but isn’t):

So, the gist of the plot is that every Darling woman is taken by Pan to Neverland, and return with their mind broken. How exactly theirs minds are broken is purposely left as a mystery and it’s heavily mixed in with Pan’s “we don’t fuck the Darlings” motto.

This makes it seem like when they do fuck the Darlings (surprising no one), that is what made them go insane. But, as this is smut-over-plot, Winnie is later going to fuck them all with no consequences.

Also, they’ve done Winnie’s mother and grandmother (was Wendy her grandmother or great grandmother? I can’t remember), so like… ew? Not directly incest, but still like… And the twins with the same girl, not precisely incest either because they didn’t cross swords, but also like…

Why do only the women get taken? Are the men in the Darling line incapable of retaining these ancestral memories that Pan wants? And why wouldn’t someone at some point have just decided to not have children, in order to save future generations from this curse?

Well, anyway, despite having the “presence of mature men” the Lost Boys are horny like teenagers, popping boners at the smallest triggers. And Winnie is out to crudely and sloppily seduce her kidnappers from the get-go.

I don’t know if the author knows that cloudberries are real. I mean I love them, it’s a staple in Scandinavia. But the way she writes about them, makes it seem like they’re supposed to only be this magical thing that only exists in Neverland.

She didn’t even drop the recipe, and I was here for those pancakes.

But, back to the cringey stuff. At one point, Winnie is taught how to gut a fish and she’s aroused by the mention of a dead fish’s anal cavity… I just can’t. I can’t. And teaching Winnie how to clean the fish goes on for several paragraphs.

And I have to wonder, where’s the line with this? Because all animals have anal cavities. Would this still be true if they were butchering a chicken? Or is it when hot men mention anal cavities that gets Winnie horned up? Or does she also get turned on by the Lost Boys taking a shit? Though that would be a very different book. But, my point is, WHY WERE WE SUBJECTED TO THE FISH IN SUCH GREAT DETAIL IN THE FIRST PLACE?!

Excuse me while I go scream into a pillow.

The twins I can’t tell apart for the life of me.

One of them cooks, that’s about it. At this point, it seems like we just wanted to split one character in two so that we can have them do a spit-roast with Winnie (iykyk). they’re also some sort of fae princes who’ve had their wings clipped for long, uninteresting backstory reasons.

The sex in general isn’t great. Kind of weird and cringey. I know it’s trying to be edgy, but it just…

Yeah, okay.

So, Vane is supposed to be the worst one of the Lost Boys. Darkest. Meanest. Spits in Winnie’s mouth and constantly degrades her. Whatevs.

The only reason these characters ever show up though, is so that the one guy who doesn’t fall for her “womanly wiles” is so that they can be written in later as the biggest softie ever. Which is what Vane is.

Aaaand so, under this hard facade, he’s the one who saves her in the end. He’s the one who worries about Winnie losing her mind. But why her and not the other Darlings? (Because she’s a pick-me-I’m-not-like-other-girls-manic-pixie-nightmare-girl.)

And this extends to the rest of the Lost Boys. Without further explanation, they constantly share with us how they love breaking women and seeing them cry, beg and bleed. But at the same time, they’re constantly worried about Winnie and how thin she is.

(Yeah, how skinny she is is mentioned so many times we lose the feeling of being concerned for her health and start hearing how much we’re supposed to love Winnie being this itty, bitty little thing instead.)

Time to touch on the Madonna-Whore complex.

The Lost Boys vacillate between shit-talking women and being worried for Winnie. This is all very Madonna-Whore complex, but it’s incomplete. It doesn’t work.

The Madonna-Whore complex refers to a pattern of thinking where a person, typically a man, categorises women into two distinct roles: the Madonna and the whore.

These roles are extreme and polarised, representing idealised purity and virtue on one hand (Madonna) and sexual desire and promiscuity on the other (whore).

The Madonna archetype is associated with qualities such as purity, motherhood, selflessness, and virtue. A man with the Madonna-Whore Complex may idealise certain women, like his wife or a woman he deeply respects, as embodying these pure and virtuous qualities.

On the flip-side, the Whore archetype is linked to sexuality, seduction, and promiscuity. Women who are perceived as sexually assertive or liberated may be placed in this category.

The Madonna-Whore complex often involves a fear or discomfort with intimacy and emotional connection with women perceived as sexually liberated. It’s an oversimplified and problematic view of women, limiting their complexity and reinforcing harmful stereotypes.

Were I to put my thinking hat on, I might say that it almost seems like the author was trying to use an inverted Madonna-Whore complex as a trope. But then I read the book, and I can’t say that’s the case. Winnie is just horny, turned on by abuse and danger and the drop of a hat. She’s a self-proclaimed whore, idolises a neighbour who was a prostitute and even her mother was a prostitute.

Winnie even tells us she earned the nickname Winnie Whore in school (the low hanging fruit here would have been Winnie the Whore, but maybe they were afraid of the mouse biting back on that one). But no matter how hard she tries to convince me that she’s in control and she’s empowered because she uses sex to get what she wants, I don’t buy it.

So, this whole inverted Madonna-Whore thing goes out the window because this book is a pile of perpetuated stereotypes and half-baked tropes.

The basis of Winnie’s interest in the Lost Boys is a textbook case of Stockholm Syndrome.

She doesn’t even try to put up a fight or try to escape. She just badly wants to use sex to get… I don’t even know what she wants, because she most certainly does not want to leave her kidnappers.

There’s no character development throughout the book, they all end exactly where they started (emotionally). I don’t even like any of them, Winnie the least. She’s like a single-celled organism and has absolutely no depth.

The writing is choppy and immature (maybe not even edited), and it contains total gems, like:

• “Make her beg for Lost Boy cum.” and
• “He’s shirtless, because of course he is.” and
• “‘Don’t get cocky.’ — ‘I won’t, I’ll just get cock.'”

The plot is erratic at best, the smut is… ugh, yeah, and the world building is all over the place. The one redeeming thing is that it’s a short book. But then it’s only the first in the series.

I’m disappointed, because the premise felt promising and I wanted it to work. I wanted to enjoy this. I just absolutely didn’t.

The best articulated, most entertaining 1-star review I saw for this was just:

“No.”

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