Growing-up in Neverland? ... tell us
your plot developments
Ever since Geraldine McCaughrean was chosen by Great Ormond Street hospital to write the sequel to JM Barrie's timeless - in more ways than one - children's classic, Peter Pan, the project has been shrouded in an intriguing veil of secrecy. A raft of confidentiality agreements and prepublication embargos ensured that barely a whisper of the plot had filtered through into the world at large - until now.
Yesterday the New York Times revealed that they'd got their hands on a leaked copy of the sequel. Set in 1926 - 20 years and a world war on from Barrie's original - Peter Pan in Scarlet opens in a world in which the Lost Boys have grown up, Wendy has married and become a mother, and the Darling's nursemaid dog, Nana, is long buried. When all of them find themselves waking up from strange dreams of Neverland, they return to the country (with the help of a new fairy, Fireflyer, who changes them into children again) and find it polluted and waning. Peter, however, is exactly the same: desperately bored, and ready for adventure.
And that's all anyone knows, or is likely to know, until the sequel is officially launched on October 5. So my suggestion is this: let's while away the intervening time with a Vulture roundup of likely plot developments in the sequel. Will Wendy be transformed from premature matriarch to protofeminist heroine? Will the ticking crocodile be overcome by blood lust and return to wreak havoc among the ranks of the lost boys? Will someone step on Tinkerbell? You decide.
