The boy who refuses to grow up teaches Wendy and her younger brothers how to fly. Then it's off to magical Neverneverland for adventures with mermaids, Indians, and wicked Captain Hook and his pirate crew in this illustrated, easy-reading adaptation of the classic fantasy.
~ Description via GoodReads
For some possibly misguided reason I decided to create a series on my YouTube channel in which I attempt to read all of the classics I feel like I should have already read. I quit English Literature after doing it for the first year of A Levels in favour of Spanish. At the time I literally thought "well I can read any time."
Wrong! I had no idea how hard classics are to read when you don't have a teacher to explain everything. Maybe its just me but honestly trying to read classics makes me feel like I am literally loosing brain cells.
So I decided to ease myself into this new series with a nice children's book. Peter Pan is one of those stories that I seem to know even though I've never read the book or watched any of the movie adaptations. I pretty much assumed that it was about a nice boy named Peter that never gets any older and his fairy companion Tinkerbell.
For some reason I thought that Tinkerbell was going to be really likeable and almost like Sparks in Spyro the dragon, the little dragonfly that follows Spyro around everywhere. But as it turns out neither Peter nor Tinkerbell were particularly nice. I guess I should have expected that, the whole point is that Peter never grows up, so I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me that he'd be really immature. I was really shocked at the end of the book when Wendy is all grown up and Peter asks who Tinkerbell is.
I thought that Peter Pan was going to be really magical like my favourite childrens books which also happen to my favourite books of all time: Alice in wonderland and the Chronicles of Narnia. In reality the fairies barely featured in the book, and the only magical thing about the Neverland was its ability to accurately represent childhood. Between the pirates and the lost boys the Neverland was very childlike and fun with the language and the concept of motherhood.
Overall, it wasn't one of my favourite children's books but it was pretty cute and I will have to watch the movie at some point and see how that compares.
Overall I give it 3 stars.
