Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson
My all-time favorite book, and this review still doesn't do it justice: a bittersweet retelling of Peter Pan from Tiger Lily's POV.
Published January 27, 2025



Book: Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson
Release Date: July 3, 2012
Publisher: HarperCollins
Format: Hardcover
Source: Bought
Before Peter Pan belonged to Wendy, he belonged to the girl with the crow feather in her hair...
Fifteen-year-old Tiger Lily doesn't believe in love stories or happy endings. Then she meets the alluring teenage Peter Pan in the forbidden woods of Neverland and immediately falls under his spell.
Peter is unlike anyone she's ever known. Impetuous and brave, he both scares and enthralls her. As the leader of the Lost Boys, the most fearsome of Neverland's inhabitants, Peter is an unthinkable match for Tiger Lily. Soon, she is risking everything—her family, her future—to be with him. When she is faced with marriage to a terrible man in her own tribe, she must choose between the life she's always known and running away to an uncertain future with Peter.
With enemies threatening to tear them apart, the lovers seem doomed. But it's the arrival of Wendy Darling, an English girl who's everything Tiger Lily is not, that leads Tiger Lily to discover that the most dangerous enemies can live inside even the most loyal and loving heart.
From the New York Times bestselling author of
Peaches comes a magical and bewitching story of the romance between a fearless heroine and the boy who wouldn't grow up.
Why I Picked It Up
Gun to my head—if you told me I could only pick one favorite book from the list, Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson is probably that read.
In thinking about it over the years, I wouldn't even call Tiger Lily a perfect book. I don't reread it frequently, it doesn't check the boxes in all the qualities I'd consider favorites, and I don't even fall into it as an escapism pick or underline every line. For some reason, it's just that singular favorite book for me.
I've been putting off this review because I feel like I just can't properly put into words why this book means so much to me. If anything, my review might be wrong no matter what, because I don't want to crystallize the wrong reasons why I love it so much.
Voice & Tone
Tiger Lily is fundamentally bittersweet. It's narrated by Tinker Bell (hey!) but follows the life of Tiger Lily, the indigenous girl who first stumbles upon Peter Pan and his Lost Boys. There's an undercurrent of sadness throughout the narrative.
Of course, Jodi Lynn Anderson is one of my favorite writers. I'll talk about this in my Each Night Is Illuminated review, but the difficulty I most encounter as a writer is how to shift characters to and from belief in ways that propel the narrative but also do justice to the subtleties of how that happens in reality. It's surprisingly tricky to do that without some overt catalyst, which is why most craft books will lay out a clear Break into Act 2-type beat that makes it impossible not to believe what's in front of them. Jodi Lynn Anderson, meanwhile, shows how someone can change when their circumstances really haven't, and all the nuances of their personhood that might make them doubt, double-back, double-down, etc,. in a less-than-linear (realistic) way.
She prioritizes atmosphere. Her prose is gorgeous—striking and creative, but piercingly universal. I underline so many quotes in every book of hers. And, while she is a celebrated writer, I do find that she's extraordinarily underrated as a writer. Each of her books hits differently with every reread, layering onto my memory in a special, transformative way.
What It's About
The book obviously takes place in Neverland. The setting is lush and descriptive and immersive—just enough to make you relish the fantastical.
First, an Englishman washes onto shore from a shipwreck on the horizon.
In terms of worldbuilding, Tiger Lily is a marvel: simple but effective. Each member of the tribe never ages until the most significant thing that will ever happen to them occurs; it might be an incident or a person they meet or something. Then, they're frozen at that age. Still, they're afraid of catching "the aging disease" that the non-islanders could bring them, so Tiger Lily defies the village by going to nurse the Englishman back to health, which has unintended consequences.
Tiger Lily stops aging at fifteen.
Tiger Lily as a character is solid and independent. The villagers don't understand her, and she doesn't care for them to. She's (if not entirely happy) content with her own company and rhythms, venturing off into the forest to hunt. Although she's mostly left alone, she commands respect and a little fear. She doesn't let anybody else force her into conformity.
Although others don't bother to look at her closely enough to notice, except to judge her, she's also gentle and good in the bravest ways. She embodies this idea I have that kindness only matters in terms of action and passivity isn't worth a damn. She's unafraid of facing punishment or consequence in the service of others, even when—especially when—nobody else knows what sacrifices she's made.
“There was strength, and then there was the determination to look strong.”
The book is violent in its colonization when the Englishman does get back to health, and is introduced to the village. And that's subtle too, in seeing what spreads, what's benevolent, and what's toxic—
A theme of the book is this tension between paralysis and change, both in terms of the individual (Tiger Lily) and the collective (the tribe.) What's still and what's stuck instead? There's this sense of everything changing too quickly to keep up with it, but in a way you didn't intend that might warp the initial entirely. Is anything actually permanent?
It also grapples with this A-leads-to-B idea that good deeds are rewarded, because in actuality, "no good deed goes unpunished," etc,. Reality is rarely that simple, because actions don't care about intention.
The Englishman's arrival triggers the bumbling idiocy (and maliciousness) of the pirates. Tiger Lily runs into Peter, who starts to open her up. And the village starts warping. I reread Tiger Lily early in 2024 and had forgotten how impressively detailed and complex each thread is when considering the length and clarity of the book. The language is lovely, but it's never excessive. For that reason, it maybe cuts more deeply.
My Personal Connection to This Book—and the Tension of Tiger Lily's Independence
I'd say Tiger Lily is a proper coming-of-age, one that gets to the core of some existential fears through the veil of a (gorgeous) Peter Pan retelling.
It captures the terror of time passing and the inevitability of change you can't control. The sense you sometimes get that as soon as you feel like you've gotten a hold on everything, something changes. That one perfect day is over. Or you've drifted from someone, or your window of opportunity's closed much, much quicker than you thought.
In Tiger Lily, everything's decided in moments they hadn't realized were pivotal. Because, at the time, they were just moments.
“There was a long moment between them that might have gone differently...It’s the two of them, jumbled up and broken apart into confused pieces, and not really understanding, themselves, what they were doing.”
I've always related to (or perhaps, more accurately, admired) Tiger Lily's self-reliant stubbornness. She's solitary and confident without being haughty, but still generous with her ability and observation. Tiger Lily's tough but also gentle in a way she allows very few to witness only after much vetting.
She's not secretly lonely, nor is her independence somehow inauthentic. But her solitude is still a weight. A welcome one, most of the time—but sometimes shreds of isolation and the desire to be known burrow much deeper than she expects, even when they pass.
When she meets Peter and falls in with the Lost Boys, she does start to gradually shed some layers and defenses. She realizes that it feels really good, and she feels understood in some ways she needed.
And then, of course, comes heartbreak.
Peter and Tiger Lily's falling out was not entirely either one of their faults. It was timing and luck, but had consequences nevertheless—subtle, as is Jodi Lynn Anderson's specialty. But that doesn't change the hurt of the aftermath.
“Sometimes I can't see myself when I'm with you. I can only just see you.”
As a teenager, and later in adulthood, this was one of the lines that gutted me most. Often, as a person with a "strong sense of self," I find that people gravitate towards me for my intensity but then paradoxically get spooked by it as soon as they get closer. There's an impossible kind of loneliness and betrayal buried in that sentiment, one wrapped up in the book and Tiger Lily's characterization at its very core. Either they saw you and cast you aside, or (and this is what you're starting to realize), they didn't see you well enough at all. Or maybe they didn’t like that you saw them back.
Peter loved her, in his own way. But he was also flighty and novelty-seeking, and she missed a visit to him right as he was starting to learn to be more grounded in a way that could have worked. So was the faith she had in him undeserved, or was it just unlucky timing?
“Many people in the village wanted her to be more of a girl, and Peter had wanted her to be large and brave but a little less large and brave than him.”
And Tiger Lily was too closed-off. After, she realized she'd missed some real chances to connect instead of maintaining her walls, but Wendy Darling is now in the picture, and regret can't claw back those small, unknown moments of decision that could have changed everything.
“Maybe she feared there were different ways of being trapped than the ones she already knew.”
Tiger Lily wasn't insecure, and she did bravely make herself vulnerable. But on the few occasions she made mistakes or misstepped, in those few moments the mask slipped—those were the ones in which someone decided to give up. Which makes her think she can never waver in her strength at all. It's always just her, alone.
“It turned out that my curiosity did not outweigh my courage after all. Sometimes love means not being able to bear seeing the one you love the way they are, when they're not what you hoped for.”
There's a frustration latent in the book too—that of Peter seeing her as a tangled mystery. I've encountered this too: the feeling that someone is fascinated by you rather than interested in you. (Coming-of-age-wise: it's definitely easier to tell first impressions of this in adulthood and steer clear. That doesn't mean you won't sometimes get it wrong.)
Because when this person finally "cracks" you, they might feel victorious, and unconsciously or not, the interest fades because they realize you're just as human as anybody else or that some of the appeal was in the chase. It's more about the pedestal they put you on than you as a person. Sure, you have a layer most people never get past—but it's never been a front.
Do You Prefer People to Be Temporary or Permanent to You?
I thought about temporary encounters while reviewing this. Some appreciate the "purity" of a limited experience with someone, acknowledging it as a deeply human moment in time that may affect them, and I had a related conversation in the fall. I was (am) of the opinion that I appreciate when people who have affected me come back into my life, that the active choice to reconnect is always there, and that no goodbye ever has to be permanent. It could feel like the blankness of meeting a stranger for the first time, or it could feel like no time passed at all; either way, I'm probably at least curious. (Even just today, I had a high school friend, who I barely saw, send me a catch-up email on a long-dormant thread. I probably haven't seen him since 2016.)
The counterpoint offered to me was that it might be better to let some people fade into memory vs. risk diluting the impact someone's had on you by revisiting them. The specific conversation was about people you meet while traveling (which is obviously not the same as the Tiger Lily-Peter Pan dynamic, but bear with me) but right now, I'm thinking about it all more broadly within the theme of the book.
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about:
- Do you take everyone by their first impressions? Who in your life do you allow to change over time, and why them?
- Do you feel like you can be independent without challenging your idea of yourself? Or is your independence based on the belief that all your decisions are justified? Similarly: do you feel like anyone can evaluate their own flaws accurately, or is it only relationships that make us view ourselves differently and reach for change?
- Do you allow others to change you, or do you see it as undermining your independence? Do you ever want anyone to change your mind? Do you have to be unaware of it while it's happening in order to accept it? Do you believe you ever bend to others without feeling like your sense of control is threatened? In what ways do you think love and fear are similar?
- Who do you let go of? Who you chase after? You could convince yourself any sudden goodbye was meant to happen, but you could also say the same about a sudden hello in the future. It's the same logic within fate vs. autonomy—but only one is already subject to confirmation bias.
- Would you rather romanticize a short fling than have a real relationship? Do you appreciate people more after they're gone? If you appreciate someone more from a distance, don't you think that makes them only an idea to you?
Reaching out afterwards and feeling the bond dilute might not be the preference if you've found that someone is meaningful to you as a memory. But I think then (depending on the context), that person then becomes more of a preservation to you than a real person: the symbol of something—what they made you feel then, maybe—rather than an individual in their own right. So you might not be affording them enough dignity.
Because if they really mattered, wouldn't you allow them to be real to you, even if it means confronting any change or difference? It's perfectly okay to fix an idea of someone in your own head, but then just acknowledge you might be remembering a version of them that doesn't exist. Because people don't "dilute" or "taint" themselves as time passes; they just change.
I'll still remember how special a specific encounter or window was, so I do treasure the limited as it is, but I also do generally reach out to people if I think about them, no matter how long it's been—as long as they haven't expressed a desire for distance for some reason (because ya girl respects space.) I don’t really ever stop caring about the people I cared about once, even if our relationships have changed.
If I'm curious, I'd rather know someone than romanticize them. I do think crossing paths with someone for a limited time can be valuable—don't get me wrong. But I just think sometimes, we might be cutting ourselves off unnecessarily in the search for a sort of masochistic potency that’s not about connection at all.
A memory might serve a singular purpose, but the reality of truly knowing someone—even when (especially when) they surprise you—is richer, which is why it tends to be a universal longing. (Studies do show that isolation is both physically and psychologically bad for us in the long term, and that regrets tend to be about missed opportunities to know and love others.) So no matter how much time has passed, I don't think you ever need to consider someone permanently "temporary" just to preserve a specific moment's impact, because you can nearly always make the choice to make them fully real to you again. A person is there until they're not. An absence is there until it's not, too. It’s not a choice in the past but rather a recurring one, every time they cross your mind, so you can always choose one day to try.
Anyway, Back to the Book Itself—and This Relevant Line
“I like to think that even if I change and fade away, some other people won't.”
With all that could possibly go wrong—especially that out of your control—is it better to risk vulnerability, or to distrust it when it appears? What if you let yourself change? What if you didn't? Would things have worked out then, or were they always meant to be fleeting?
All in all, there's a lot of nuance in opening yourself up to someone else: platonic, romantic, you name it. And Tiger Lily does such a phenomenal job showing the risk, especially as someone who stakes their identity on being better and braver alone.
Tiger Lily is powerful for its depiction of the tragedy here: loving anyone often forces us to balance who we are with who we could be if we let someone else in, and sometimes, we get it wrong. Or fate does, and we don't always see how we can correct the mistake.
In case it were not obvious, I believe in second chances overall. I think that recovering something special to you—a goal, a person, a framework—after a loss can be even more meaningful than if everything went right in the first place. Otherwise, you might not realize the depth of it. Many would argue that human existence is just one long story of redemption and that’s what matters most in the end (resilience, forgiveness, uncertainty, imperfection, past and future, etc,.) and that line of thinking’s informed a lot of my feeling of resonance and grace lately. And a theme of my book — that we are what we choose to return to rather than what we run from. (So it’s actually no surprise that Tiger Lily is my meaningful favorite. Clearly, I’m passionate about this topic.)
Of course, if you never get the chance to try to recover what mattered, there's a devastating beauty in appreciating what's been important to you in the past no matter how long it lasted. But something about regret and missed connections always seems to stick with us more, and Tiger Lily depicts that reality with a lot of nuance and tenderness.
The book is sad, of course, but it can also be hopeful. Both Peter and Tiger Lily are unexpectedly changed by each other, and they both carry that experience with them to different ends. And Neverland is forever changed too.
Lines I Love
“You have to be careful who you meet. You can’t unmeet them.”
“Did you know I always thought you were braver than me? Did you ever guess that that was why I was so afraid? It wasn't that I only loved some of you. But I wondered if you could ever love more than some of me.”
“I like to think that nothing's final, and that everyone gets to be together even when it looks like they don't, that it all works out even when all the evidence seems to say something else, that you and I are always young in the woods, and that I'll see you sometime again, even if it's not with any kind of eyes I know of or understand. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the way things go after all—that all things end happy.”
“'I'm not myself,' she offered, guiltily. She softened around Tik Tok, and when she did she was, for those rare moments, girlish. He smiled. 'You can never say that. You're just a piece of yourself right now that you don't like.'”
“And I never expected that you could have a broken heart and love with it too, so much that it doesn't seem broken at all.”
“She said she thought there were different ways of loving someone, and there were some she used to think were the most important, and now she had changed her mind.”
Overall
Overall, Tiger Lily's just a stunning book. As it's a favorite, it's been a WLS pick for a long time, and I still get messages from readers who have chosen to pick it up.
The language is poetic but relatively straightforward, so leans more approachable rather than pretentious, with some striking lines that tend to focus on the raw emotional ache of change, loss, grief, love, etc,. Nostalgia seeps through every pore of the book, but the reflections on the past don't feel romanticized either—just given the appropriate gravitas. I've always personally found Tiger Lily introspective and elegant.
I know some literary friends who would call the work profound and brilliant and moving—up until they see the packaging showing it was written for teenagers. (So that's my way of saying that Tiger Lily would appeal across the board, and you might overlook how phenomenal it is because of your own bias.) It's timeless and complex enough to satisfy the literary crowd, but is also marketed to young readers starting to wade into young adult books.
The characters' miscommunications are fundamentally human and all the more impactful for it. You wonder what exactly they got right or wrong, and whether all of the book's events were worth it to each of them.
Tiger Lily is strong, but shouldn't always have to be. And on that note: to what extent do people become what we expect of them? And the subplots! Like with Moon Eye and Tik Tok (yes, named before the social platform.) They will make you hurt: fair warning.
As a teenager, I read it while (or maybe even before) navigating my first love, friendships, major changes, etc,. so had a newfound awareness of how quickly everything could shift. In adulthood, I empathize with Tiger Lily's independence and sensitivity to impermanence, wondering whether it's better to feel moved by something temporary or to recognize enough to salvage it before it's gone. How much change should you want for yourself?
All in all, it handles plenty of questions that we all grapple with eventually—and this book does such a stunning job framing emotional complexity within a beautiful, subtle fairytale retelling that will linger.
For fans of:
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson; Ulysses by Josh Garrels (song); This Is the Story of You by Beth Kephart; Midnight at the Electric by Jodi Lynn Anderson; bittersweet books; Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta; All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (trust me on this); Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver; etc,.

