After finishing Leviathan and Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld (reviews coming, I swear!), I wanted something in a similarly adventuresome vein. I’d been meaning to try the Starcatchers series, so I listened to the first one on audio.
About the Book:
Peter and the Starcatchers is a prequel of sorts to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Peter and his fellow orphans are put on board a ship called the Never Land as she prepares to sail from London. Their destination? Rundoon, ruled by a barbarous king to whom the orphans are to be given as slaves. On board, Peter meets and befriends Molly, daughter of the new ambassador to Rundoon. There’s a mysterious chest aboard the Never Land, and Peter is as determined to find out what’s inside as Molly is to stop him.
What ensues is a madcap adventure on the high seas involving porpoises, savages, mermaids, flying children, and the dread pirate Black Stache, all locked in a battle for the mysterious trunk.
My Thoughts:
I wasn’t sure what to expect, going into Peter and the Starcatchers, seeing as Dave Barry is one of the authors. Anyone who’s read Barry’s adult books would be justified, I feel, in wondering how his style and humor might translate into an adventure tale aimed at children. I was pleasantly surprised. Perhaps it’s Ridley Pearson’s influence; the end result is exciting, entertaining, and not so ridiculous that you can’t take it seriously.
There are a lot of very clever touches in Peter and the Starcatchers. One of my favorites was the name of Black Stache, clearly a play on the better known dread pirate Black Beard. Barry and Pearson managed to explain each piece of Barrie’s Neverland in terms of their story, so that Peter and the Starcatchers gives as plausible an explanation for the formation of Neverland as one might require. The mermaids, the crocodile, the pirates, the savages, the Lost Boys, Tinkerbell — they’re all there by the novel’s end. Which, seeing as this is a prequel to Peter Pan, I’d expected; I spent much of the novel waiting for each piece of the Neverland puzzle to become clear. I was able to identify most of the elements as soon as they entered the story, long before they’d developed into their final Neverland forms; but then, the book was geared toward a much younger audience than myself. The creativity of Neverland’s origins kept me interested, even if the suspense did not.
My biggest complaint about Peter and the Starcatchers was the endless back and forth. Every group chasing the trunk–and by the end there are quite a few–had and lost the treasure several times each. There are endless moments of surprise and ambush, mini battles and clever tricks, daring escapes and heroic rescues. I could have done with maybe half the antics; it got to be a little much for me. By the end, I felt a bit like I was watching one of those scenes from an old cartoon where the bird is swiped by the cat, is saved by the dog, is stolen by the cat, escapes on its own, inadvertently walks into the cat’s mouth, and so on. All it needed was some frenetic classical music as an underscore!
I think Peter and the Starcatchers is perfect for the age for which it’s written, which is middle readers. It’s exciting and funny and creative, with plenty of action and antics. At some point I may pick up the rest of the series, but I feel no compelling need to do so right away.
The audio version was read by Jim Dale. I was not as impressed by this recording as I have been by some of his others. He excels, of course, at character voices, but there was something rushed about the way he hurried through pauses and chapter breaks. A minor flaw, really; I’d still recommend listening to Peter and the Starcatchers as a good alternative to reading it. I think the recording would work well for children too.
Those are my thoughts. Check out Peter and the Starcatchers on GoodReads or LibraryThing, read other bloggers’ reviews, or listen to an Audible sample!
Your Turn!
What are your favorite books that tie in somehow with another well known story?
“Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)–they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make as they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else–); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,–and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves–only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them. (p. 19-20)
In Lena’s sheltered, contained world, love is a disease: amor deliria nervosa, to be precise. Fortunately, there’s a cure, which everyone is required to receive when they turn eighteen. For Lena, that’s only a few months away, and she can’t wait. Sure, people lose a little of their old selves in the process, and true, sometimes the procedure causes long-term damage, but those side effects and risks are worth it to be guaranteed immunity, and with it stability, safety, and happiness. As school wraps up, Lena is eagerly anticipating the coming events: the final examination that will decide her future, her pairing with the boy she’ll marry, and finally, her cure.
