Peter Pan

Description for PETER PAN by J M Barrie with a foreword by Susan Cooper:

For the past one hundred years the story of Peter Pan, the boy who ran away the day he was born and stubbornly refuses to grow up, has charmed and entertained countless children and adults who identify with Peter's penchant to live among the fairies in the Neverland. In this novel based on his 1904 hit play, J. M. Barrie delightfully charms us with the story of Peter's acquaintance with the three children of the Darling family, Wendy, John, and Michael. Although the Darlings seem to lead an ordinary life in Edwardian London, their nurse, Nana, is a stray Newfoundland dog they found in Kensington Gardens who possesses "a genius [for] knowing when a cough is a thing to have no patience with and when it needs stocking round your throat."

Events begin to unfold after Peter, who often visits sleeping little ones in the night to play his pipes, is discovered by Mrs. Darling in her children's nursery. In his hurry to escape a grown-up, he catches his shadow in the window and is forced to leave that part of himself behind. Peter waits until the Darling parents are away to return for it, and seduces Wendy, John, and Michael by teaching them to fly. And so the three children willingly go off with Peter to the Neverland, where they encounter the Lost Boys, unclaimed children who have fallen from their perambulators and are sent to live under Peter's charge; the comically evil Captain Jas. Hook, who has lost his hand to a crocodile and is somewhat obsessed with the rules by which a gentleman should behave; Hook's pirate cohorts like Smee and Starkey and Bill Jukes; Tiger Lily and her redskins, who scalp both boys and pirates; and perhaps most dangerous of all, the mercurial fairy Tinker Bell, whose jealousy of Peter's friendship with the maternal Wendy creates the worst havoc for the Darlings.