peter and the starcatchers
i have lots of ways to combat the silence of being a stay at home mom. and when i say silence, i don’t mean that there aren’t any noises. it’s the silence of loneliness. don’t get me wrong, i love spending time with my little guy, but when i wish that i had someone to talk to (and my sister doesn’t answer her phone), i turn on a book on tape. suddenly my house is filled with friends and voices and swashbuckling adventure. i listen to books when i fold the clothes and clean the spit-up off the bathroom floor and make the bread.
when i get a book on tape, i’m looking for certain things. (obviously, with my sit down books, i can manage something a little more involved.) it can’t have a lot of characters: i have to be able to turn it on and off a dozen times a day without getting lost. it has to have fast-paced action and an easy to follow plot. it has to have quirky details that make me smile.
that said, i usually end up listening to young adult novels.
i’m currently enamored with peter and the starcatchers. someone let dave barry write a children’s book. i admit, i was skeptical when i first saw his name on the cover paired with ridley pearson, but i’m converted. this is a little gem of a story.
i can’t vouch for its greatness unrecorded, but with jim dale reading, you can’t help but set that broom down and sit on the edge of a stool to see just what will happen to peter and his gang of orphaned boys. from sails in the shape of a women’s brassiere, to flying children, to a real-life mermaid with a mean bite, to a gang of pirates hunting orphaned boys on a densely filled jungle island — barry and ridley’s creation will tang familiar, but in the end they’ve come up with a completely bizarre and delightful sort of prequel to the original j.m. barrie fairy tale.
and, while i’m at it, if you haven’t read j.m. barrie’s peter pan, read it. i probably don’t have to tell you that its scope and genius far outshines the cartoon disney version.
Filed under book on tape, young adult lit |4 Responses to “peter and the starcatchers”
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Sarah referred me to your blog and I am so glad that she did! Steve Barry is brilliant and it is brilliant that he wrote a YA novel. I will read it for sure.
I hear what you are saying about the quiet house. I had to force myself to make some friends (which basically goes against my natural instincts) when we moved here last month because I felt so lonely during the day. Continuous “ring around the rosies” makes for bad conversation.
I’ll check in here and there!
Bethany
I meant Dave Barry… by the way.
I love to listen to books on tape as well. I can only listen to Young Adult or Children’s books (and nothing scary or intense - for some reason listening makes things much scarier than when you read them). Recently I listened to “From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” (however you spell that). It was an entirely different book than when I read it. Somehow having it read out loud changes the story.
I loved Peter and the Starcatchers! The sequel, Peter and the Shadowchasers, is good but not as good as the first. Only I’m really glad that you listened to it instead of reading it because there were so many typos that I almost stopped reading half a dozen times. I mean, I stopped counting after like 30. Luckily they fixed that in the sequel. Glad you enjoyed it.