Title: Peter Pan
Author: J.M. Barrie
Publishers: Puffin Classics (This Version)
Format: Clothbound Hardback
Pages: 207
Genres: Classics, Fantasy, Adventure, fairytale, Children’s fiction
Rating: 1.5-2/5
Release Date: August 7th 2008 (this version), December 27th 1904 (original)
Where To Buy: Book Depository
Summary: Peter Pan and Tinkerbell lead the three Darling children over the rooftops of London and away to Neverland – the island where the lost boys play. Magic and mischief is in the air but if villainous Captain Hook has his way, before long someone will be swimming with the crocodiles.
Review: This book felt like torture to me, and that is not what I wanted to feel whilst reading it. I love the movie and I thought I’d love the classic story but my goodness was I mistaken. I didn’t enjoy the book one bit.
I for a start couldn’t get into the story, I didn’t like the characters and worst of all the way it was written was atrocious and made it next to impossible for me to delve into the world of Neverland.
I had high hopes last year when I started reading this but quickly found I wasn’t going to be a fan of it and when I picked it up again this weekend it was the same, I still didn’t enjoy any of it.
It’s supposed to be this magical and fun adventure to the land where children don’t grow up, where fairies and mermaids live but I couldn’t find the adventure, it all felt dull and heartless and it wasn’t written in a magical way to help you escape to this world.
So I’m sure to some this story is beloved and adored and a favourite classic book to them and I’m so jealous of you if you had the ability to love and enjoy this story but that certainly isn’t the case for me at all even though I really wanted to like it, I just couldn’t.
About Author: Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM was a Scottish author and dramatist, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan.
The son of a weaver, Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh. He took up journalism, worked for a Nottingham newspaper, and contributed to various London journals before moving to London in 1885. His early works, Auld Licht Idylls(1889) and A Window in Thrums (1889), contain fictional sketches of Scottish life and are commonly seen as representative of the Kailyard school. The publication of The Little Minister (1891) established his reputation as a novelist. During the next 10 years Barrie continued writing novels, but gradually his interest turned toward the theatre.
In London he met the Llewelyn Davies boys who inspired him in writing about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens (included in The Little White Bird), then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, a “fairy play” about this ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland. This play quickly overshadowed his previous work and although he continued to write successfully, it became his best-known work, credited with popularising the name Wendy, which was very uncommon previously.
Barrie unofficially adopted the Davies boys following the deaths of their parents. Before his death, he gave the rights to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital, which continues to benefit from them.
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