In 2015, the photograph and news story about the Kurdish-Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who was found washed up and dead on the shores of the Mediterranean, was widely circulated. The reaction to the photograph triggered an upsurge in international concern for the Syrian refugee crisis. What Strange Paradise, a novel by Omar el Akkad, a journalist by profession, begins with a Syrian boy, Amir, who is also washed up on the shores of a Greek Island. But unlike the real life story, the novel offers a different outcome: Amir survives the shipwreck and is rescued by a local 15-year-old girl, Vanna. Offering a cutting critique of global relief efforts, the novel does not suggest alternative resolutions. Instead, it dwells on the boy’s life, past and present; and by the end of the novel, the children escape authority but Amir’s fate remains tragic. What Strange Paradise is an inversion of the Peter Pan story by J.M. Barrie, which is the story of the boy who is stuck in perpetual childhood or, inversely, never gets to become a man. Neverland is a powerful metaphor for queer refusal, for play, and the turning away from prescribed temporalities. In Neverland, all rules are broken and the reality at hand—a refugee camp with no foreseeable exit plan—is rejected. In this way, the novel gestures towards a radical shift from the epistemologies of conclusions to the value of what makes life livable. Although as readers we never experience Amir playing/living like Peter Pan likes to do, arguably the novel describes his voyage on the fight for the right to play. And Vanna, his Wendy, helps him fight for that right.