After my recent dive into Peter Pan’s history i was so looking forward to this.
And i can happily say it was everything, and more, than i hoped it would be.
Everything in the sense that it was up there with at the level of Alice, but instead of the violent schizo escaping from a high security mental hospital, rapidly withdrawing from her anti-psychotic meds leading to a total psychotic meltdown while running around town with a mad axeman on a murder spree, this one’s delving into the realms of psychopathy. Of course, like Alice you can just read it as a straight forward story and not get too into the mental health side of what’s going on, but it’s all there if you want some depth to it. Christina is one brilliant writer.
That’s everything i hoped it would be, the more than i hoped it would be was the similarity between Peter Pan and his Island and a person and place i found myself in several years ago. It was at times quite disturbing in how similar it all was, to really understand how the protagonist, Jamie, felt and to be able to put myself in his place, because i’d found myself in a very similar situation with a very similar person. But as much as it was disturbing it was so because it was so incredibly cathartic and i’m really pleased to have had the experience of reading this book, so thank you Christina for that as well.
On top of all that, i certainly felt it showed respect for J.M. Barries’ work, and built on that really well giving it all a whole new dimension to consider, one only hinted at in the original works, and i definitely recommend reading those three original books by James before embarking on this one — although this can be read as stand alone if you so wish, i just feel you’d be missing out a great deal by doing so.
For now though, this brings an end to my current Peter Pan binge, but i’m sure i’ll be back to Neverland in the future, there’s just too much been written around the original story for me to ignore for long.
