The Adventures of Mary Darling by Pat Murphy Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fantasy, retellings
Pages: 320
Published by Tachyon Publications on May 6, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Who is Mary Darling? In this subversive take on both Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes, a daring mother is the populist hero the Victorian era never knew it needed. In a witty and adventurous romp, The Adventures of Mary Darling draws on the histories of women and people indigenous to lands that Britain claimed.
Mary Darling is a pretty wife whose boring husband is befuddled by her independent ways. But one fateful night, Mary becomes the distraught mother whose three children have gone missing from their beds.
After her well-meaning uncle John Watson contacts the greatest detective of his era (but perhaps not that great), Mary is Sherlock Holmes’s prime suspect in her children’s disappearance. To save her family, Mary must escape London—and an attempt to have her locked away as mad—to travel halfway around the world.
Despite the interference of Holmes, Mary gathers allies in her quest: Sam, a Solomon Islander whose village was destroyed by contact with Western civilization; Ruby, a Malagasy woman on an island that everyone thinks is run by pirates (though it’s actually run by women); Captain Hook and the crew of the Jolly Roger; and of course, Nana, the faithful dog and nursemaid.
In a witty and adventurous romp, The Adventures of Mary Darling draws on the histories of women and people indigenous to lands that Britain claimed, telling the stories of those who were ignored or misrepresented along the way.
My Review:
Peter Pan’s story is one of those stories that we all think we know. There have certainly been plenty of variations, from the original by J.M. Barrie in 1904 to the animated 1953 Disney version to 2003 live-action adventure film Peter Pan and all the various TV versions, movies and video games in between and ongoing.
But all of those versions, as chronicler Jane Darling rightfully points out in her introductory letter to her Grand-Uncle John Watson, were based on Barrie’s original story which was, to paraphrase her words rather a lot, told in such a way as to make the boy who refused to grow up, Peter Pan, the hero of the thing.
Which, based on her own grandmother’s account, he clearly was not. And he’s certainly not a heroic figure in Jane’s retelling, as her version is intended to correct that previously male-centric record, tell the truth – at least according to her grandmother – and give all of the female figures in the story the due that Barrie would never have granted them.
And what a story it is!
Because, looking at the tale of Peter Pan from an adult perspective – and not the child I was when I first saw the Mary Martin version on TV as a child – one does end up wondering WTF Mr. George and Mrs. Mary Darling were doing while Wendy, John and Michael were off having adventures.
While George Darling is being, frankly, ridiculous – as his granddaughter Jane doesn’t mince all that many words in describing – Mary Darling is quietly going about, making plans to shed the respectable persona she has been wearing like a badly fitting costume for entirely too long. Even as her husband makes plans to lock her up in an asylum for “her own good”. Even though he knows better. He’s just not ready to admit it.
Mary Darling knows EXACTLY what has happened to her children. Because once upon a time, it happened to her. Mary is also entirely too aware that Peter’s adventures can be very, very dangerous – never for him but all too frequently for the children that he charms into following him to Neverland.
Just as he once charmed Mary’s little brother Tommy – with Mary following after because she was the big sister and it was her job to take care of him. Just as Wendy sees it’s her job to take care of her little brothers John and Michael.
Once upon a time, a long time ago in a place very far away from either of the places Mary ever called home, Mary did her damndest to keep as many of Peter’s “Lost Boys” alive and fed and cared for as possible, no matter how badly she wanted to go home or how much she resented being shoehorned into the position of “mother” when she still wanted her own mother so desperately. Or an adventure of her own. Or both.
So Mary, along with her friend Sam and the reluctant cooperation of her brother Tommy, made a very careful plan to escape Peter and Neverland before Peter got all of them killed – as he was wont to do when boys got rebellious and/or started to grow up – or the island did the work for him.
Now Peter has her children, so she has made a different but equally careful plan – to go to Neverland and get her children back. With her husband, her Uncle John, and her Uncle John’s friend Sherlock Holmes following at her back, whether to aid her or stop her, because they all think they know better than she does.
Because, after all, they are men, and she is merely a feeble woman who can’t possibly know her own mind. Or how to use the sword and the knife she has sheathed at her waist. Even though she so very clearly does. And has. And certainly will again if any of them get in her way.
Escape Rating A: I went into this expecting a grand time – and I absolutely got one.
I picked this up because it is, in part, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and I’m ALWAYS a sucker for one of those. But this is neither a kind interpretation of Holmes NOR is the ‘Great Detective’ either the central character of the story or, for that matter, all that great. He’s too grounded in logic to accept that sometimes the world isn’t logical at all, and that, as Shakespeare said, “There are more things in heaven and earth…than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The Holmes of Mary Darling’s adventures has all the blind spots and prejudices of the character from the original Holmes canon, and they do not serve him in this story. (If you’re curious about a similar variation on Holmes, take a look at the interpretation in A Study in Sable and the books that follow it in Mercedes Lackey’s Elemental Masters series.)
There was also plenty of delicious irony in this portrait of Holmes, as his denigration of magic and spiritualism and particularly fairies stood in direct opposition to his creator Arthur Conan Doyle’s later-in-life rather strenuous belief in all of the above.
Mary’s adventures in this story represent a sloughing off of the strait-jacket of respectability that she had worn for so many years after her childhood adventures, and a return to the persona that should have always been hers. And the punishment for it that she barely escaped would have been ridiculous, severe and unjust to the extreme all at the same time. Her husband, who had himself been one of Peter’s Lost Boys and KNEW for certain that she was not mad, was living inside the dog’s kennel when he called in doctors to have Mary committed. He’d obviously lost his tiny mind but she was the one who needed to be locked up?
I cheered when she escaped them all. That along the way she received help from her women’s club filled with suffragists, rebels, and umbrella-wielding stick-fighters reminded me so much of Amelia Peabody Emerson and her archaeological adventures that I smiled broadly in remembrance even as I loved seeing them all do their bit in Mary’s rebellion and escape.
It’s not just Mary who gets her due in this story, as her tale takes her back in memory and onwards to the places where she has friends and allies. It is also, explicitly, an anti-colonialism story that allows the peoples that Britain has claimed to have ‘conquered’ and ‘civilized’ – read that as oppressed and suppressed, also get to claim their proper places in this story every bit as much as Mary does.
Mary’s adventure, not in spite of but because of the magic of it and in it, is a grand and glorious one. And it’s HERS and absolutely not the adventure of any of the men who stand in her way and certainly not that of Peter Pan, the most lost boy of them all.
