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Neverland is a book about the author, poet Vanessa Kisuule’s, lifelong love for Michael Jackson, and her struggle to reckon with that love in the face of sexual abuse allegations against the artist. How can she measure these revelations against her relationship with the music and performances she has adored since childhood? The tone is meandering, gossipy and intimate; it often feels like Kisuule is working things out as she writes.

If there’s a problem with the book, it’s that the title (well, the subtitle) doesn’t really reflect the contents. If you challenged me to tell you something it has to say about ‘the pleasures and perils of fandom�, I might struggle to give you an answer. In a particularly effective section, the author grapples with the concept of seeing things from a perpetrator’s perspective � how difficult it is to consider ideas around prevention of, or even tolerance for, taboo desires. This is thoughtful and interesting, and it’s relevant to Kisuule’s reckoning with her admiration of Jackson, but it hasn’t, strictly speaking, got anything to do with fandom.

Neverland reminded me a lot of Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It. Both work well because their authors structure the book around an obsession of their own (in Tiffany’s case it’s a love of One Direction). Simultaneously, in both cases, this means the books veer away from their mission statements somewhat. You could apply some of Kisuule’s thinking to your own adoration of a ‘problematic� artist, but it isn’t really presented that way within the book: it’s all very specific to Kisuule and Jackson. As such, it’s not a book full of lightning-bolt moments that will stay with me, more a likeable, chatty, open-ended memoir.