Review: Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

Peter Pan is the first book this year that completely embodies the spirit of The Year of Reading Whatever the Hell I Want. I've had the 1996 set of children's classics as long as I can remember, and therefore this book (and The Wizard of Oz, The Water Babies, etc) has sat on my shelf since pretty much forever. Only, when Ellie mentioned that she was reading it, I couldn't remember ever having actually picked it up myself. I mean, I'm sure I must have but I had zero recollection. So, in the spirit of reading whatever the hell I want, I thought 'eh, I'll read it now!' And I did.

Plot summary: One night when Mr and Mrs Darling were out, Peter Pan flew down to their house. In no time at all he had taught their children, Wendy, John and Michael, to fly, and they were off to Neverland on the most exciting adventure of their lives. In Neverland, where the lost boys never grew up, they met mermaids and pirates - including the terrible Captain Hook, whose hand had been eaten by a crocodile.

I'm so happy I read (or reread, who knows?) this book - it's completely different from what I was expecting. It's surprisingly well-written for a 1912 children's book in a sort of chatty, snarky tone that made me snort at times. Whilst the plot is obviously aimed at a younger generation, I never once felt that I was reading something too young for me as I was busy amusing myself with the writing. 

Or at least, I was when I didn't try and over-think it. I was talking about this with Ellie, and we couldn't quite work out whether the tone was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, or whether Mr Barrie was actually quite serious about his comments regarding women and the like. I'm leaning towards intentional humour as it's just a little too over the top if he meant every word.

The bed was tilted against the wall by day, and let down at 6:30, when it filled nearly half the room; and all the boys except Michael slept in it, lying like sardines in a tin. There was a strict rule against turning round until one gave the signal, when all turned at once. Michael should have used it also, but Wendy would have a baby, and he was the littlest, and you know what women are, and the short and the long of it is that he was hung up in a basket.

Wendy's play-acting as a mother was pretty much my favourite thing about the whole novel and I really hope it's satirical. She's meant to be about twelve years old, but runs about doing chores and to her babies. Her smugness is genuinely hysterical.

When she sat down to a basketful of their stockings, every heel with a hole in it, she would fling up her arms and exclaim, "Oh dear, I am sure I sometimes think spinsters are to be envied."

Her face beamed whenever she exclaimed this. 

I love her. Well, much more than I like Peter himself, anyway, who is much more of an arse than he appears to be in the Disney film. Is it okay to not like Peter Pan? He's rude, verging on cruel, to the other boys and Wendy sometimes, and there's a passage about how the whole island sort of relaxes and breathes a sigh of relief when he's not there, but tenses up again whenever he returns. Disney made him much more loveable.

The plot is very similar to the Disney movie (or should I say that the plot of the Disney is very similar to this!) as it doesn't appear that they changed much. The mermaids, the Indians, the crocodile... it's all here, if slightly more brutal. Still, it was a classic adventure book aimed at boys, what can you expect? Captain Hook dismembers one of his crew with his own hook and references are made to tripping over the bodies of the people Peter Pan has quite casually murdered. Nice. 

I actually do recommend this book. It's much engrossing than I expected, with a writing style that's just perfect, regardless of intent. I'm tempted to wander off and watch the film now, but I honestly don't think it's anywhere near as good as the book. 

 I'll link to Ellie's review here, if she posts one. Feel free to twiddle your thumbs in the meantime.

Review: The Assassin's Curse by Cassandra Rose Clarke

No, I'm not actually back from my illness/grouchy break yet (considering it's actually gotten worse for unrelated reasons) but I found this review I'd half-written and figured I may as well finish it off. The Assassin's Curse was actually sent to me by Strange Chemistry publishers way back last October, but I've clearly been slacking in my reviewing responsibilities. The next book in this series, The Pirate's Wish, is released on the 6th June 2013 however, so keep your eyes peeled for that one.

Plot summary: Ananna of the Tanarau abandons ship when her parents try to marry her off to an allying pirate clan. But that only prompts the scorned clan to send an assassin after her. And when Ananna faces him down one night, armed with magic she doesn't really know how to use, she accidentally activates a curse binding them together. To break the curse, Ananna and the assassin must complete three impossible tasks all while grappling with evil wizards, floating islands, haughty manticores, runaway nobility, strange magic, and the growing romantic tension between them.

This is a truly great story. Cassandra Rose Clarke has somehow managed to combine fantasy, sci-fi and romance into a very unique book that kept me captivated. We frequently see the same ideas used over and over again in fiction, but The Assassin's Curse somehow breathes a new life into the genre. It has quite a simple plot but I find that it works quite well - books don't need complicated place names and contrived plots to be great.

That said, I do feel it could be written better and emphasis seems to have been given to the wrong points occasionally. The actual event that 'bonds' Ananna and Naji is almost skirted over; it takes a paragraph or two, if that. For something that the entire book is based upon, I would have preferred a little more time spent on it.

I've come to the conclusion that a lot of effort has been put into the story of The Assassin's Curse, but not a lot into the actual book. The characters have unpronounceable names and I found Ananna's dialogue to be very difficult to follow at first. I understand that she's meant to be a little common and no nonsense, but it's always going to stick out when you see sentences full of apostrophes and slang. There are ways to show dialect without typing it out phonetically.

It also doesn't really end. This book is definitely more of a build-up to the next one rather than a book in itself as not a whole lot actually happens. It's more... trying to discover what's going to happen. I did feel quite a bit let down as I would have liked at least something to be resolved by the end.

I'm actually looking forward to the next book quite a lot as I did enjoy reading The Pirate's Curse. I loved the plot, characters and settings but it did need to be tweaked a little somewhere on the journey from story to novel.

Visit Cassandra Rose Clarke here or find her on Twitter.

Review: The Pirates! in an Adventure with Moby Dick by Gideon Defoe

At the end of The Pirates! in an Adventure with Moby Dick, there are ten pages of other (pretend) titles by the same author, and I love this book so much that I would happily read every single one of them. I'm sure The Pirates! in an Adventure with Heavy Petting and The Pirates! in an Adventure with a Steep Hill would sell especially well.

They’re back!!! The Pirate Captain and his irascible crew of scoundrels return in their soggiest saga yet.Fresh from their mishaps with Charles Darwin and the evil Bishop of Oxford, the Pirates set sail in a bouncy new vessel——purchased on credit. In order to repay his debts, the Pirate Captain is determined to capture the enigmatic White Whale, hunted by the notoriously moody Ahab, who has promised a reward.Chaos ensues, featuring the lascivious Cutlass Liz, the world’s most dangerous mosquito, an excerpt from the Pirate Captain’s novel in progress (a bodice ripper, of course), whale ventriloquism, practical lessons in whale painting, a shanty-singing contest in a Las Vegas casino, and a dramatic climax in which the Pirate Captain’s prize ham saves the day! Move over, Herman Melville.

So I've apparently infected the blogosphere with manic love (the best kind of love, naturally) for these wonderful little books with my review of ...with Scientists. I've been going on about these books to anyone who'll listen, and even a few people that won't. Check out Ellie's review of ...with Communists or Katie's look at ...with Scientists if you're not already 100% convinced!

Enough about the other books, let's look at this one :) In the interests of full disclosure, I haven't read Moby Dick (the proper book) yet, although I did buy it last week. You don't really need it to understand this book though, just as long as you know the very basic summary - Ahab is Captain obsessed with hunting a great white whale that once bit his leg off. Wow, that was hard, wasn't it?

The recent film actually encompasses this book as well, so the trailer suddenly makes a lot more sense. Here, the Pirate Captain suddenly realises that their ship is looking a bit decrepit, so they head off to Cutlass Liz to get a shiny new one, The Lovely Emma. Unfortunately they can't quite afford to pay her just yet so they take on a contract for Ahab to eliminate that famous white whale.

He looked at his second-in-command seriously. "I'm making a list of when it's acceptable for a pirate to cry."
"That sounds very important, Captain," said the pirate with a scarf, fiddling axiously with his eye-patch.
"So far I've got: one - when holding a seagull covered in oil. Two - when singing a shanty that reminds him of orphans. Three - when confronted by the unremitting loneliness of the human condition. Four - chops. I've just written the word 'chops.' Not really sure where I was going with that one. Any ideas?"

Just like the other books, ...with Moby Dick has an awesome sense of humour that mixes silly slapstick with subtle innuendo to produce one of the funniest books I've read all year. I also love the informative footnotes that provide fun facts, like the origination of the phrase 'cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey' or that it is suspected whales use the magnetic field of the Earth for navigation - that's why so many whales are beached at places where there is an anomaly in the Earth's magnetic field. I did run off to check the facts so I didn't look like a complete moron after this post went up, but thankfully they are all true!

These books are just good fun. They're tiny, but I could happily read them over and over and I doubt they'd ever get stale. I've just done a quick Google, and apparently Gideon Defoe is in talks with Aardman Animation to turn the last two books into a movie as well. I know, I'm raving and I'm sorry. I'll stop when you finally cave in and buy a copy :)

Read my review of The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists or visit Gideon Defoe's website here.

Review: The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists by Gideon Defoe

I was so desperate to read The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists, that when my reserved copy at arrived at the library I did what I never do - I read two books at once. I know, I know, I understand your shock and your disapproval. I'll do better in future. In my defence though, I'm currently reading Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore and it's long. Plus it's mostly dialogue based so it's slightly slow going at places... more to the point, I really wanted to read this one! It's short and light, so it didn't detract from that much Bitterblue time... *coughs* Anyway, it was worth every second, because I LOVED this book!

Plot summary: Worried that his pirates are growing bored with a life of winking at pretty native ladies and trying to stick enough jellyfish together to make a bouncy castle, the Pirate Captain decides it's high time to spearhead an adventure. 

While searching for some major pirate booty, he mistakenly attacks the young Charles Darwin's Beagle and then leads his ragtag crew from the exotic Galapagos Islands to the fog-filled streets of Victorian London. There they encounter grisly murder, vanishing ladies, radioactive elephants, and the Holy Ghost himself. And that's not even the half of it.
 
I first saw this book in the Borders store years and years ago (long before any mention of the movie, thank you very much!) and I really wish it hadn't taken me this long to get round to reading it. The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists is the start of a five book-long series, starting with this one and ending with the newly released ...with the Romantics (because I REFUSE to type it out every time). It's a tiny, light-hearted book that more than brightened up my gloomy day with its typically British (read: 'awful') weather.

So, the basic premise has the Pirate Captain and his crew going on adventures, shockingly. In this one, they are led to believe by their arch nemesis, Black Bellamy, that there's a ship from the Bank of England carrying tons of gold across the Ocean and they set off in search for it. Except perhaps Black Bellamy is not quite as reformed as they have been told, because the ship in question turns out to be the HMS on their second voyage to the Galapagos Islands!

It's got a very simple tone - verging on clunky at times, but never quite crossing over the border. It never seemed to take itself seriously - it's just a good, funny story told for a laugh. Very few people actually have names and there's hardly a great deal of time invested in character development, but it just adds to the whimsical nature of ...with Scientists.

'Living at sea tended to leave you with ratty, matted hair, but the Pirate Captain somehow kept his beard silky and in good condition, and though nobody knew his secret, they all respected him for it. They also respected him because it was said he was wedded to the sea. A lot of pirates claimed they were wedded to the sea, but usually this was an excuse because they couldn't get a girlfriend or they were a gay pirate, but in the Pirate Captain's case none of his crew doubted he was actually wedded to the sea for a minute.'

It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but there are a few paragraphs that made me smile. Gideon Defoe (I've looked and looked, and it really does seem to be his real name) has a knack for using a sardonic, conversational tone that reminds me a little of a simpler Terry Pratchett, which can only be a good thing. I love how he brings in historical characters like Charles Darwin and Robert Fitzroy, who I didn't know much about but was apparently the Captain of the HMS Beagle, and his work in the meteorology field is responsible for the accuracy of weather predictions today.

The author even uses footnotes in a similar way to Terry Pratchett, although to enlighten us with factual asides, not to amuse. For example, apparently the HMS Beagle was only ninety feet long and notoriously unseaworthy - in his notes Darwin described the voyage as 'one continual puke.' I've wandered off to check the accuracy of a few of these facts so I don't look like a complete moron believing made-up things meant only to entertain, but no, they're true. They aren't frequent enough to really be annoying but they do add a nice happy bonus to the book :)

I got my copy from Sheffield Library, but I have every intention of purchasing this book and the next four in the series the second I get paid next week. I need my own copy to nuzzle and smile at lovingly! It's just so, so good!

Visit Gideon Defoe's website here, or find him on Twitter.