★★★★☆ She was Joan of Arc. She was Athena. She was the Wendy.

The Wendy

Erin Michelle Sky, Steven Brown

I am a fan of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. His dark view of childhood is refreshing, if you have met too many angelic children in literature. Seriously, J.M. Barrie uses the word "heartless" eight times to describe children.

Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time, and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be rewarded instead of smacked.

(Do your own research! Here is the Project Gutenberg full text of Peter Pan. Do a text search for "heartless.") An even stronger selling point for The Wendy was the striking cover -- -- yeah, absolutely I want to read that! Don't judge a book by its cover, they say, but every now and then I do, and I am seldom misled.

To be honest, The Wendy is not much like Peter Pan. Wendy Darling is an orphan who wants to become a ship captain. She is taunted for this unfeminine ambition, which only makes her more determined. Many characters appear whose names are the same as those of characters in Peter Pan -- we have a John, a Michael, a Nana, a Captain Hook, a Smee, and a Peter. These characters, however, are not much like Barrie's. Mr and Mrs Darling don't appear, or at least they haven't yet. The Wendy is the first book of a trilogy, so I suppose there is till time.

There are a lot of books about improbably martial girls at points in history when it was next to impossible for a girl to have anything resembling a military career. (L.A. Meyer's Bloody Jack and Avi's The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle come to mind.) Some of these stories are even true. I love such stories. The Wendy is a good one.

The Wendy's path to publication was unusual. Authors Erin Michelle Sky and Steven Brown, who call themselves "Dragon Authors," funded the publication by releasing excerpts on Patreon.

The Wendy began as an experiment. Could an unknown writing duo attract enough of a following on Patreon.com to defray the cost of publishing a book? We were as surprised as anyone when the answer turned out to be “yes.”
We posted the first chapter in February of 2016, and by September our extraordinary patrons had bought us a cover. For a book that wasn’t even finished. Such was their faith in us. They went on to fund the book’s editing, cover layout, and interior design—an entire book paid for in advance, one chapter at a time.

I enjoyed this, and will continue with the series.

The Wendy on Amazon

Goodreads review

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