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Book Summary and Reviews of Betwixt and Between by Jessica Stilling

Betwixt and Between by Jessica Stilling

Betwixt and Between

by Jessica Stilling

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  • Published:
  • Dec 2013, 296 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Peter Pan meets The Lovely Bones in this beautifully rendered and emotionally devastating debut novel about where children go when they die.

Betwixt and Between follows three intertwining narratives: that of Preston Tumbler, a ten-year-old boy who is poisoned by a neighbor and wakes up in Neverland, where he finds himself - along with a group of other deceased children - under the watchful eye of Peter Pan; Preston's mother, Claire, in the real world, as she deals with the loss of her son; and a family in Victorian London as they wait for their little girl to awake from a coma, a family whose neighbor happens to be Peter Pan author JM Barrie.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Stilling's take on this familiar tale is provocative and poignant, rich with emotion and powerfully described, laced with profound contemplations about dying too soon and growing up too quickly." - Publishers Weekly

"A revisionist reconstruction that never quite works due to the jarring disjunction between fantasy and reality." - Kirkus

This information about Betwixt and Between was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Jessica Stilling

Jessica Stilling has an MFA from City College, where she currently teaches creative writing. She has been an editor for The Muse Apprenticeship Guild, The Olive Tree Review, and The Castalia Project. She lives in New York City.

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