When seventeen-year-old orphan Kit Learmonth tries to commit suicide by slashing her wrists in the swimming pool of her prestigious boarding school, her uncle takes her back to her childhood home to recuperate. Before her parents drowned in an accident at sea when she was ten, Kit grew up on an idyllic island owned for generations by her wealthy, infamous family. Though its official name is Learmonth Island, everyone refers to it as Neverland. In Kit’s mind, it is a place of magic and adventure, populated with mermaids, pirates and sea monsters. Her beloved father featured these stories from his daughter’s imagination in his bestselling book, Kingdom by the Sea, but drowned shortly before the book’s release. Once the site of extravagant Gatsbyesque parties, Neverland has been transformed into a treatment facility and school for sick and damaged teenagers, the Lost Ones, under the care of Kit’s psychiatrist uncle, Doc, and his colleague, Dr. Hannah Ward. 

Kit is reunited with her old friends, anorexic Gypsy Jones, who is still besotted with her ex-boyfriend, a minor soap star called Ethan Hale, and sociopath Alistair Morden, Kit’s first friend on the island and still her casual lover. Now the senior kids on the island, the group resume their old habits, including smuggling cigarettes, drugs and booze down to the lighthouse for all night parties. But since Kit left for school on the mainland another patient has arrived. Rohan Calder is deep in grief for his former girlfriend, Milly, who was killed in a car accident. Rohan and Kit are assigned as sailing partners in a high-stakes interschool competition, and the physical attraction between them grows into an intense relationship as she leads him on a tour of the secret places of the island. Doc makes repeated attempts to connect with her and tolerates her flouting of his rules, but their relationship remains strained. 

Kit is forced to attend group and individual therapy sessions with Dr. Ward, but resists confronting her addiction to self-harm or her repressed memories of her childhood relating to the circumstances of her parents’ death. She experiences panic attacks when sailing, has disturbing dreams of monsters from the sea and hears a persistent, sinister clicking sound. She neglects Gypsy and Alistair to spend time with Rohan, who is a revealed to be an obsessive, controlling boyfriend. 

But after Rohan is injured during a storm and confined to hospital, Kit finally begins to work to recover her lost childhood. Under hypnosis, she confronts the reality of her childhood with a mentally ill parent, and the shocking scene that she witnessed when her mother deliberately jumped from their boat, followed by her father, who chose to be with his wife rather than his daughter. Through therapy sessions with Dr. Ward, she begins to realise that her memorialisation of her father as her hero was inaccurate, and to overcome her compulsion to self-harm. The click click click sound that terrorises Kit is revealed to be an amalgam of scuttling crabs and sea creatures, the creep of her mother’s bony, waterlogged fingers, and also the tap of the keys on her father’s laptop.

She makes her peace with Rohan and her friends, who forgive her bad behaviour and are also on their way to recovery. Kit is also reconciled with Doc, whom she realises has been a reliable and loving mentor rather than the controlling warden she cast him as. Although she is almost an adult, they sign papers to formalise his adoption of her. In the final sailing race, she and Alistair triumph using courage and cunning, and she transforms the scars on her wrist into a tattoo of a ship riding a wave. Having completed her school exams, she decides to take a gap year before starting university, and embarks on a worldwide solo sailing voyage, having made her peace with her family history:

"I can’t change the past, and I don’t know what lies ahead. Maybe my life will be filled with the kinds of adventures I dreamed of as a kid, and I’ll do something epic and be remembered for all time like Odysseus. And maybe my life with be ordinary. Disappointing even. But like the ancient sailors who braved unchartered waters, I’m finally willing to try my chances." (p. 317).

Neverland is rich in intertextual allusions. The title of the book refers to J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, and many of the imaginary characters and creatures who inhabit Kit’s fantasy version of the island are borrowed from this narrative. In an interview on the Books and Publishing website, McGovern describes the unsettling experience of rereading this much loved childhood favourite as an adult: 

"I was surprised by how dark it is and how different from the innocent bedtime story I remembered. Barrie’s Neverland is a frightening place and there’s a prevailing sense of melancholy throughout the narrative. I became intrigued by my misremembering." (see here, accessed: March 23, 2020).

The force of nostalgia and its power to distort memory is embedded within Kit’s psychology, as is Peter Pan’s refusal to grow up. Like Barrie’s famous character, Kit resists the close of childhood, preferring to live like a savage pirate on her fantasy island. 

From Harry Potter to John Marsden’s Tommorow series, many other books – both for young and adult readers - are referenced within Neverland. The glamorous lifestyle of Kit’s parents evokes the aesthetics of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, but this idyll is gradually exposed as the reality of life with Kit’s mother, who suffered from bipolar disorder, is revealed. Nerissa remains an obscure, distant figure in Kit’s memories in contrast to her charismatic, storytelling father, and it is painful for her to confront her mother’s rejection and remoteness. Her portrayal seems to draw upon the figure of Zelda Fitzgerald, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and similarly died young in tragic circumstances. As a means of managing his wife’s illness, Kit’s father draws his daughter into the imaginary realm, making it a game that Kit has to be "quiet as a mouse" when "the monster" is in the house (p. 263). The book explores the allure of fantasy when the real world is difficult or frightening, but asserts that ultimately trauma can only be healed through direct confrontation, supported by therapy and medication.

In addition, the book contains references to many characters and narratives from classical mythology. Kit is a keen scholar of the ancient past, with knowledge of Greek and Latin that she uses to make her own translations of Homer’s poems. Throughout the novel she persistently draws connections between ancient texts and her own life, although they are not always accurate. Soon after returning to Neverland, she compares herself to one of the people in Plato’s Cave, misinterpreting the allegory to argue to Doc that "there’s no point in exploring if it means giving up the place I want to be" (p. 21). Later, she compares her father’s book "mourning me and the fall of our family" (p. 187), to the moving scene in Homer’s Iliad in which Hector and Andromache are together for the last time. Throughout the book the Odyssey is repeatedly invoked as the model for a courageous and arduous journey, with its hero cast as the prototypical pirate, both brave and wily. Doc, who seems well versed in the classical tradition like his niece, visits her map-covered bedroom and murmurs to her sleeping form "Courage, Odysseus...Brave the monsters and come home to me" (p. 57). In spite of her rudeness and disobedience, his love for her remains as steadfast as Penelope’s for her husband. 

Neverland engages not only with Homer, but with the tradition of the poem’s reception. During their illicit sessions in the lighthouse, Kit and her friends toast each other with words borrowed from Tennyson’s Ulysses:

"One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." (p. 52).

The book presents the challenges faced by teenagers as battles requiring fortitude and endurance, and does not shy away from difficult topics. The representation of the practicalities and emotional impact of acts of self-harm is confronting. In the same interview McGovern writes that "challenging stories are vital because they promote empathy and show readers that they are not alone", but there are moments when the book risks glamourising Kit’s illness. Kit’s solipsistic first-person narrative has the effect of leaving some of the characters, Hannah Ward and Alistair in particular, undeveloped. 

The setting of the book is Australian, though only subtly rendered via passing references to surfing champions, TV soap stars, and private school parents picnicking with "plastic champagne flutes and plates of strawberries and dip" (p. 284) as they watch their children competing in the sailing race. The complexity of the book’s intertextual allusions, together with the cast of selkies, mermaids and other imaginary creatures who populate Kit’s fantasy version of the island, locate Neverland as a story with multiple cultural influences.

Memory trick: Margot McGovern on ‘Neverland’, booksandpublishing.com.au, published April 13, 2018 (accessed: March 23, 2020).

Riverlea Miriam, Courage, Odysseus: an Interview with Margot McGovern, antipodeanodyssey.wordpress.com, published April 18, 2020 (accessed: April 20, 2020).

Thalia, Book Review – Neverland by Margot McGovern, squishyminnie.com.au, published January 31, 2019 (accessed: March 23, 2020).