I was looking for something more cheerful to read after Animal Farm, but I was still looking for short books, so I picked up Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. This is the book that the Disney movie is based on, but the Disney movie changed a lot, as you might expect.
Peter Pan follows the three Darling children, Wendy, John, and Michael, who go off to Neverland with Peter Pan, a boy who never grows up. They meet the lost boys and have adventures and face down the dread pirate Captain Hook. But the book also follows the Darling parents, and deals with their grief and loss and guilt when their children vanish one night and don’t return.
This was a fun little book. I loved all the fantastical adventures the kids have. I really love how it dives into the children’s desire for a mother and the parents’ loss of their children. I was also intrigued by the way even the adventures in Neverland felt like the children were pretending. There’s definitely a reading that all of Neverland is make believe, and I love that the book neither confirms nor denies that. Basically this book gave me feelings.
There were a couple things that bothered me about this book. There’s a group of people on the island of Neverland who are always referred to as the redskins, and they are very stereotypical native Americans. Also Wendy, as the only girl among Peter Pan and all his lost boys, is relegated to the role of mother, so she only does all the cooking and cleaning and everything while the boys have the adventures. She seems perfectly happy with that, and that’s fine, but it bothers me that she gets this role purely because she’s a girl. This book was published in the early 1900s, so obviously these problems are products of the book’s time, but I still think it’s important to recognize that by today’s standards, it’s problematic.
On the whole, I enjoyed this book a lot. I honestly don’t remember the Disney movie that much, but it was fun to see where it came from and what else the book did. I love the themes of childhood and adulthood and belonging to someone else, and as I said, the fantastical fairy tale elements are great.
Have you read Peter Pan? What did you think?