Lisa Jensen’s new book, Alias Hook, currently available online in its English edition—and soon to be available (May 14) through St. Martin’s Press—is a delicious reimagining of the world of Peter Pan. (I’m telling you this so that you can order the book in time for Christmas giving.)

Many of us know the delightful fairytale world of Peter Pan, thanks to the James Barrie classic about a band of enchanted lost boys led by the eternal boy, Peter. We fondly recall lovely Wendy who became their surrogate mother, their fantasy Neverland home, Peter’s sprightly sidekick Tinker Bell, and of course the archetypal pirate Captain Hook who lost his pocketwatch — and his hand — to a hungry crocodile.

Jensen has reimagined the children’s tale as a more (much more) adult saga, in which Captain James Hook is a cultured, introspective 18th century protagonist trapped in the magical and malevolent world of a vengeful Pan. Turning the tables on the childhood classic, Jensen tells her story from Hook’s point of view.

“Children find the Neverland in their dreams, their longing bores through the barrier between their world and this one, and in they tumble. My men too, return this way. For ages I deluded myself it must be possible to dream a way out.” Under the influence of Pan’s enchantment, Hook can neither die nor leave Neverland.

Mere dreaming has left Hook a prisoner of Neverland for centuries—when suddenly the plot thickens and a grown woman named Stella Parrish, manages to dream her way onto the Island of Lost Boys, abruptly overthrowing the monotony of Hook’s days and night. Things become lively as confrontations with the blood-thirsty children compel Hook and Parrish to inlist the native Indians, fairies and mermaids in a race against time. And a rush to accomplish an escape against the wishes of Peter Pan.

Jensen tells her tale with bravura command of her imagined world and its vivacious denizens. Her ability to create a deeply sympathetic and complex voice for the maimed, world-weary Hook is a literary tour de force. Equally engaging is Neverland’s visually rich and unexpected terrain, such as the shimmering undersea caves of the lorelei, where Hook and Parrish find themselves …
“in another grotto, hidden behind the first, but this one full of air above the pool, under a ceiling of rock as high as a cathedral. Clusters of glowing, incandescent crystals, unimaginable in the world above, thrust downward from the rock ceiling like gaudy chandeliers, bathing everything in rainbow hues…a luminous mineral haze hangs in the air, and the water glows velvet green.”

Descriptive flourish never slackens the pace of Alias Hook, an engrossing page-turner written with confident flair, keen powers of observation, and true novelistic tension. Remarkably imagined characters abound, and there are huge helpings of blood, guts, swordplay and sexual heat. Jensen has managed to pull off some of the most believable, sensitive but hot, sex scenes in the fantasy genre.

Alias Hook, by Santa Cruz author Lisa Jensen is available online at Amazon, and at The Book Depository (free shipping!). Get it. Read it. Give it!