Relive the magic of finding Neverland in this beautiful Painted Edition of Peter Pan. This classic tale of never growing up and found family will delight new readers and old as they follow Wendy, Michael and John on this timeless adventure.
This magical classic tale of childhood is now available in an exclusive collector's edition, featuring beautiful cover art from artist Laci Fowler and decorative interior pages, making it ideal for fiction lovers and book collectors alike.
Beloved by fans around the world,?Peter Pan?is the story of a little boy who doesn’t want to grow up. This time-honored classic is now available as an exclusive collector's edition.
Whether you're buying it as a gift or for yourself, this remarkable edition
A beautiful, high-end hardcover featuring Laci Fowler’s distinctive hand-painted art and high-end embossing/debossing treatments to bring the art to lifeEmbossed cover art and gold foilingDetails of the story are incorporated into the cover art as surprise findsDecorative interior pages featuring pull quotes throughoutMatching ribbon marker and gold page edgesPart of a 4-volume collection including?Anne of Green Gables,?The Secret Garden, and?Winnie the PoohAn excellent gift for teachers, librarians, or children's classic collectorsIn pursuit of his lost shadow, a young boy named Peter Pan enters the bedroom of three children named Wendy, Michael, and John. After Wendy manages to reattach Peter's shadow, Peter asks the three children to come with him to Neverland, the place where they’ll never have to grow up.
When Wendy and her brothers journey with Peter to Neverland and meet his ageless band of Lost Boys, they realize Neverland isn’t as perfect as it seems when they meet the evil Captain Hook.
Exploring the time-honored themes of the magic of imagination, courage, and the beauty of parental love, this unique collector’s edition presents J. M. Barrie’s beloved tale of friendship, memory, and family in a giftable new way.
James Matthew Barrie was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan. He was born and educated in Scotland and then moved to London, where he wrote several successful novels and plays.
The son of a weaver, Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh. He took up journalism for a newspaper in Nottingham and contributed to various London journals before moving there in 1885. His early Auld Licht Idylls (1889) and A Window in Thrums (1889) contain fictional sketches of Scottish life representative of the Kailyard school. The publication of The Little Minister (1891) established his reputation as a novelist. During the next decade, Barrie continued to write novels, but gradually, his interest turned towards the theatre.
In London, he met Llewelyn Davies, who inspired him about magical adventures of a baby boy in gardens of Kensington, included in The Little White Bird, then to a "fairy play" about this ageless adventures of an ordinary girl, named Wendy, in the setting of Neverland. People credited this best-known play with popularizing Wendy, the previously very unpopular name, and quickly overshadowed his previous, and he continued successfully.
Following the deaths of their parents, Barrie unofficially adopted the boys. He gave the rights to great Ormond street hospital, which continues to benefit.
(includes a non-reading period of 5 days so really I finished it in a few sittings)
Notes: It's hard to review a classic, and it’s hard for me to read this as an actual children's book without thinking about Taylor Swift and Matty Healy but I will try because I need something wholesome and magical after the last 2 books I read about grief and depression.
This is childhood, magic, whimsy, surreal and unreliable, suspense and absurd humour, but also surprisingly violent and sometimes clearly an analogy for real life and (obviously) ageing, at times even patriarchal critique. (Somehow I doubt this book was really meant for children. Parts of it could be interpreted as being about age regression due to childhood trauma, obviously there’s the racism but that’s what it was like back then… what I don’t really understand is why there were Native Americans in England? Apart from that, there's some strange sexual innuendo around Tinker Bell and her figure and everyone seeing her in a negligée, or Wendy touching Peter "solicitously, lower down than his chest". And even between Wendy and Captain Hook. Also the fairies are having an orgy???)
In terms of the plot and world, however, I think this book is the furthest removed from reality out of all the books I've read so far. Which is a nice change.
Overall... It's a good book. I could have done without the long, minute descriptions of fights but I guess that's the adventure part. It was an escape from the real world but not as much as I had thought it would be, because there are so many metaphors I could relate to from my own experience and - as I will elaborate on below - fuckboy awareness.
Elements I enjoyed include - the dog as a nanny - Mrs Darling tidying up her children's minds - fairies being born from a baby's laugh and dying if you don't believe in them - Peter as tiny dictator with a baby's laugh - swallows nesting in houses just to hear the stories - Tinker Bell's undefined offensive language (and the mermaids too) - the crocodile that liked Captain Hook's arm so much it wanted to eat the rest of him, but it swallowed a clock so he can always hear it approaching - for Peter, make-believe and true are the same thing - the lost boys and their mommy k!nk (and Peter: "hmm what do these girls want from me, if not to be my mother???") - Tinker Bell's made-up designer furniture - time is calculated by moon and sun but there are so many of them in Neverland it's hard to know how time is passing - Wendy isn't upset about going away from her parents because she knows they keep the window open for her to fly back in at any time.... what a metaphor for coming of age - the selfishness of growing up, Peter trying to keep Wendy away from her mother because he wants her for himself - forgetting your past as you move on, and then coming back and things have changed - creating exams for her brothers about their old life so they don't forget it - the way the narrator involves the reader in the story, talking to us directly as if we are watching the events together from a distance, even tossing a coin on which story to tell or "keeping an eye on them" for Mrs Darling. this makes it feel dynamic and interesting - Saturday night is whenever you want it to be - the Never birds making their nest in the shape of a hat after Peter gave one mother bird a hat - "every great pirate has a touch of the feminine" - every time you breathe in Neverland, a grown-up dies - Tinker Bell's heroic sacrifice for Peter - idk why I find it so funny that the pirate went to public school - all the pirates are so easily scared and stupid - as the lost boys live with Wendy's parents, they slowly forget how to fly because they no longer believe. and Wendy grows up and Peter stops visiting and she thinks maybe she imagined it all. losing the magic - the ending!!!!!!!! although mate it’s a bit fucked up innit
And because I couldn't resist, here are all the parallels between Peter Pan and #maylorgate, and also references in her songs: - how Wendy "just knew" Peter had been there while she was asleep - "Peter losing Wendy" (cardigan) - literally the song "Peter" - the lost boys (aka the fuckboys) desperately wanting affection from a woman but as soon as she gets close, they hurt her (I could rant on about how this is basically about the male loneliness epidemic… like why can’t they just tuck each other in or even learn to sew their own clothes in their endless youth??) - meeting up once a year for spring cleaning, "one day" style - "many girls hear it when they are sleeping, but I was the only one who hears it awake" - "she was not a little girl heart-broken about him; she was a grown woman smiling at it all, but they were wet-eyed smiles." - the whole story happens in Wendy’s wildest dreams, it’s hinted that it’s not even real and in the end, she is left with a subconscious memory of an illusion - Peter is a cocky womaziner who focuses on his own pleasure only, forgets people and commitments but acts casual about it, and gives girls an acorn when they want a kiss. He lets people fall (literally, p.35) if they’re not interesting to him anymore (sound familiar???) - Wendy is always supposed to be nice and good (but what about Wendy?) - Wendy is a great storyteller, she adds something interesting to his life so that’s why he likes her. but in the end he uses her for cleaning
Soooooo… needless to say this book is incredibly racist. It’s favorite racial slurs are used to refer to the indigenous people of the Neverland… who are basically just racist caricatures written by a white supremacist who thought that adding them in would make the Neverland more scary. It’s a yikes from me.
This is yet another story that is darker than it’s Disney counterpart. I wanted to read it because of all the amazing adaptations such as Peter and the Star Catcher and Jake and the Neverland Pirates and Lost in the Neverwoods by Aiden Thomas etc. It was cool to read the original inspiration of these wonderful stories, but the racism wasn’t cool to say the least.
The narrator was opinionated and an active member of the story at times which is something I like and something I felt worked for this story. And the characters were fun and over the top, minus the racist ones. Hook was a very intriguing villain. Ultimately, while the themes of growing up are great, there are also heavy themes of racism and misogyny, which are not cool. If you’re looking for a Children’s classic with similar themes of growing up that isn’t so racist, read Tuck Everlasting.