The Second Star

I don’t think that I have ever written an unfavorable review of a book – mostly because if I don’t like a story within the first fifty pages or so, I will put it down. But I recently read a book on a whim before I discarded it and figured that I should pass on the message that it was pretty terrible.

Let me start off with saying that the reason I read it was that it was a marketed as a modern, magical realism, Peter Pan retelling – basically three of my favorite things. The book is called Second Star (I don’t want to bad mouth the author so I won’t even add it here) and is basically about seventeen-year-old Wendy Darling who sets out to find her missing surfer brothers and finds herself on a secluded California beach, where she meets Pete, Belle, Jas, and other wandering misfits, learns to surf, helps some of them steal while avoiding the other’s drug trade, and falls in love. The writing was so terrible, the characters so flimsy, and the plot so unbelievable (she goes to spend weeks at an abandoned house with surfers and tells her parents five minutes before she leaves that she is going on a trip with her best friend and – Didn’t they remember? – and they LET HER GO) that I literally only kept reading it because I thought that eventually the magical realism would appear and something interesting might happen (it doesn’t).

So, in short, skip this book. One star.