Peter and the Starcatchers

Rating:
Summary: GREAT
Review: The book "Peter and the Starchatcher" by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson is a great read. This fantasy book is the prequel to the Peter Pan movies and books. This is a great read that explains why things are the way they are in Peter Pan movies.
It starts off by Peter and his orphan friends going on a ship (The Never Land) to go be servants to King Zarboff the Third, who is a mean king that feeds children to his pet snake. A trunk filled with starstuff (a magical substance) is placed on the Never Land instead of the intended Wasp (the fastest boat ever made). Molly is on the Never Land also, she tries to protect the trunk because she is in a club called "the Starcatchers", who are meant to protect the starstuff from evil people. Then, Black Stache finds out about this treasure and hunts the Wasp. He does not find the trunk on the Wasp and finds that it is on the Never Land. Stache takes over the Wasp and renames it, "the Jolly Rodger". He hunts down the Never Land when Peter uses the trunk and flies away with it to help protect the trunk from Stache. Peter comes to an island where the Mollusk's (natives to the island) live. The orphans and a guy named Alf show from the shipwrecked Never Land, right after Molly shows up. They get captured by the Mollusks and use the starstuff to escape. Black Stache and his crew come to the island looking for the treasure. Once the treasure is found, Stache and Peter fight over it. Peter chops off Stache's hand and is henceforth known as Captain Hook. Peter gives the starstuff back to the Starchatchers and decides to stay on the island and have adventures of his own.
This book was a great read, if you like fantasy. It explains a lot about how Peter came to fly, where he lives and the start of Never Land. It kept me interested the whole time, from shipwrecks to mermaids. I also liked how there were drawings to help set the scene and picture that you were there. I recommend this book to anybody that like the Peter Pan stories.

Rating:
Summary: You won't be able to put this down
Review: A terrific fantasy prequel to Peter Pan that neither kids nor adults will be able to put down. The action focuses on a mysterious trunk that several evildoers are intent on capturing for themselves. The only negative I have heard from kid readers is that the last 50 pages are a bit tedious, as bad guy after bad guy tries to capture the treasure (I tend to agree with this assessment). Overall a great read that both boys and girls will love.

Rating:
Summary: Kept my 7 year old son enrapt
Review: For any child who blows through a Magic Tree House 'book' in one afternoon, this book is a welcome change. A real novel, with depth and expanded themes, to enthuse and engage a young reader. My 7 year old son read it at bedtime for 3 weeks and when he completed it last night, he was jubilant. If your child is ready to graduate to something more satisfying than a chapter book and ready to experience the excitement that comes with the love of a novel, this is wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: Could not put it down!!
Review: I am a 33 year old mother of two. I borrowed this book from the library so that I could read it aloud to my children, but after I read the first chapter to them, I read the next chapter to myself so that I could see if there was anything objectionable coming up. Well, my darlings never got to hear the rest of the story - not because there was anything bad in it - but because I couldn't stop reading it to myself! I was so caught up in the story (the action and the sci-fi) that I wanted to read it all by myself. I plan on purchasing it so that I will have it in my library for my kids and me to read again. You will love this book!

Rating:
Summary: A Worthy Prequel
Review: I and my almost-eight-year-old son are both Peter Pan fans. I'm also a Dave Barry fan. This book was an enjoyable and fairly quick read, filled with Barry's quirky humor. The story is good and piratical/fantastical, though the way he arrives at certain things in Neverland coming about... they don't exactly fit the classic Peter Pan world I recall.

I'd recommend it if you're a Pan fan or just want a good kid friendly action-adventure story. I have a vague recollection that there may have been a word or two that would be questionable for very young readers (though I don't recall the instances).

Rating:
Summary: delightful, quick read
Review: I received this book for Christmas and thoroughly enjoyed the read. It was light, amusing, and a somewhat more detailed backstory to what powers Peter Pan than I expected, but an absolute delight.

Rating:
Summary: Passable Adventure, but this is NOT Peter Pan!
Review: Let me start out by saying that Peter Pan is, and always will be, my favorite story of all time. So, needless to say, I entered my reading of this novel with a healthy amount of skepticism. Still, I tried to let as much of that go and enjoy the story. This attitude got me through about the first half.

If the reader of this book knows anything about the original Peter Pan classic, they will most likely scoff at this prequel. Honestly, I'm not even sure that the writers ever read the original. Almost everything that could have been contradicted is. It's as if the things Peter says about his life when he comes to Wendy's window never happened. I don't want to give away any spoilers, so I will not list off the many offenses that this book makes. But, trust me, pretty much everything we know about Peter's past is glossed over and replaced with something different. This is disrespectful, to say the very least.

Furthermore, I was disappointed that the menacing Captain Hook supposedly started out as a pirate named Black Stache (named for his mustache - I know, most unfortunate). It's not funny. It's not cute. It's just stupid.

I also take issue with the whole idea of "starstuff." It felt like demystifying the origin of flying and Neverland made the story that much more banal. Peter & The Starcatchers took such care to explain away everything exciting about the original that it made it all quite mundane. There's absolutely no mystery left. And (don't get me started) the explanations given in this book about Neverland and flying don't make any sense if compared to the original.

I didn't hate this book, at first. And, if it wasn't associated with Peter Pan at all, I might have enjoyed it. But, as it stands, this just seems like a cheapening of the whole story.

One final thing that I could not believe was how many grammatical errors there were in this book. It got to the point where, every five pages, there was a word omitted or something written down wrong. This struck me as painfully unprofessional. Didn't this go through revisions? Wasn't there an editor? I have never seen a book with so many errors. Do they think the reader is dumb? Because that's what it felt like. In fact, that's what the whole story felt like.

Rating:
Summary: Oh My God.
Review: So this is the prequel? I can't believe this book received a good grade. J.M. Barrie already wrote a great prequel to Peter Pan (Peter Pan In Kensington Gardens), so I don't see why these two authors felt the need to write another one. There's just no mystery, no excitement, no...nothing. If you're a fan of the original, most likely you'll find yourself disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Peter Pan Adventure
Review: This is a wonderful fantasy adventure story for all ages! It is a well thought out beginning to Peter Pan, and Never Land. I also loved that it wasn't just a boy having all the adventures and doing all the saving, the girl in the story Molly did her equal amount of adventuring, and saving as well. I love the story of Peter Pan, and I think Peter and the Starcatchers did a fabulous job of staying true to the characters of Peter Pan, and explaining what might have happened to bring Never Land into existance.

Rating:
Summary: A great book for kids & grown ups to share
Review: This is, hands down, the best book I've picked up to read to my kids. I have three sons ages 6-10, and its always a struggle to find something that will keep their collective attention. This book, they beg me to read. (The older two try to sneak in & read ahead. And, I confess I did it too one night not too long ago.) Barry, who wrote a scathing critique of Davinci Code author Dan Brown's writing style in his weekly column not too long ago, has adopted that style to great effect. It keeps the kids and parents hooked. Like the Potter books, it is a great read in and of itself and is worth reading even if you don't have kids.

I am a big Dave Barry fan, but never thought of him as a serious author till now. Pearson, the co-author, has written several really good fiction books which my wife and I had listened to on audio. I probably would not have bought Peter and the Starcatchers but for my prior experience with Pearson's books given that Barry is often a bit silly and too grown up for the kids to get. Great combo.