Peter Pan Book Review | Reading Disney

hello disney friends and welcome back to dole of the day a place where we talk disney i'm rebecca and if you're new or if you're returning i just want you to know that you are so so welcome here and i am very happy to have you join us so today kicks off a new segment that i want to add to my channel where i review books that disney movies are based off of most of you don't know but i am a huge reader i love books i always have loved books i started out in college as an english major i really wanted to go into publishing but that just didn't pan out that's just not where life took me but if i ever got a chance to go back to school i would probably go back and do something related to english writing publishing something along those lines so the book that i picked out today my first book review is peter pan um guys i love peter pan it has some of the most whimsical um movie moments and it has fun characters like tinkerbell decided to join us here today um she's going to sit over here while we review the book but we're going to start with um some background about the author of peter pan because i truly believe that especially in the case of peter pan the author's life and some of characteristics about the author truly are significant to the story so peter pan is written by the author j m barry j m stands for james matthew keep in mind that his first name is james because that will come into play later so he was born in 1860 in scotland and he was very close with his family his early childhood was described as very happy and a very loving home but something really sad happened when james matthew berry was only six years old his brother was actually killed in a skating accident and j.m berry witnessed the whole thing sadly j.m berry's mother grieved to the point where she would just lock herself in her house and refuse to go anywhere um or talk to anyone and so jay and berry really felt a burden to help cheer his mother up so he would go into his mother's room and try to emulate his little brother trying to make his mother laugh in the way that his little brother had done he really sought to be humorous to make his mother happy he even would keep tally about of how many times he made his mother laugh so this was something that was super important to him he really watched this grief process and his mother and he really loved his mother and wanted to help her which of course is sweet but it's also an enormous burden for a young child to carry jm barry unlike peter pan did eventually grow up and he married his marriage is described as a pretty loveless marriage um people historians do believe that he and his wife could not have children and that was a source of a lot of conflict in their marriage so his marriage did eventually break up jay and barry did become very close in his adult life to a family called the davies they had five boys and he loved to play with the boys and to imagine with them and to watch them when his parents were out um a lot of the stories that he wrote in his lifetime were derived from imaginings that the young boys had and that he observed them having eventually though both of the parents in the davies family passed away and so jay and barry adopted all five of the sons peter pan is especially believed to be based very much on the play of these young boys and the um the book actually started as a play a lot of j.m barry's works are actually plays but the play was so enormously popular that he ended up writing it in book form and it actually went through several forms before the classic form that we refer to today as being the book peter pan um but sadly there was still tragedy to come in jm barry's life so the oldest of the davies boys was killed in world war one and not long after that the youngest of the davies boys died in a drowning accident and j.m barry never fully recovered from this he was never the same he never was able to publish another work that had the same popularity and notoriety as um peter pan so i think that j.m barry's life is very significant when you read peter pan because red in the lens of j.m barry's life peter pan is actually a very sad very dark book think about it children who never grow up and in jay and barry's life children who never had the chance to grow up because they were lost at a tragically young age so is the neverland like an afterlife for children who have passed away and never had the chance to grow up it's a possibility that that is what jay and barry had in mind in the book we see that jay and barry did not shy away from death there is lots of violence in the book there is lots of talking about killing and dying and um on page 87 of this copy of peter pan um peter is about to die he's stranded on a rock and he's about to drown and he says to die will be an awfully big adventure neverland is the place where adventures happened is neverland the afterlife i don't know what do you think another thing that i think is very significant that i discovered in this book was the description of the darling mother grieving the children when they were gone from their home um in to neverland so i'm going to pull up that um quote real quick because i believe that the way that his mother that the darling mother is described as grieving is probably similar to what jay and barry observed in his own mother after his little brother passed away from the skating accident that's this is on pages 142 and 143 and the books reads on that eventful thursday week mrs darling was in a night nursery waiting george's return home a very sad-eyed woman now that we look at her closely and remember the gayety of her in the old days all gone now just because she has lost her babes i find i won't be able to say nasty things about her after all if she was too fond of her rubbishy children she couldn't help it look at her in her chair where she has fallen asleep the corner of her mouth where one first looks is almost withered up her hand moves restlessly on her breast as if she had a pain there some like peter best and some like wendy best but i like her best supposed to make her happy we whispered to her in her sleep that the brats are coming back they are really within two miles of the window now and flying strong but all we need whisper is that they are on their way let's perhaps that was j barry's wish for his own mother that he could just say my brother is coming back and everything would be okay again another reflection of jay and barry's own life that i did notice in the book although i don't know if it's you know on purpose or if it was just the name that he liked the best but captain hook's first name is james like james matthew berry and some of the things i'm going to talk about later with things that i've recognized in this book and some theories that i have about the book actually play along with this idea that that was intentional so now let's talk about jay and barry's writing style i do love jm barry's writing style it is very whimsical and playful and it's almost like he is poking fun at adults and poking fun at um childhood um in a very loving gentle way um as he writes one of the questions that i have about the book is are the events in the book meant to be magic or are they meant to be metaphor you can never really truly tell because the way that he writes makes it possible that this never really happened and it was all in the children's heads but if a child read the book they would see it as magic here's an example here mrs darling first heard of peter when she was tidying up her children's minds it is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for the next morning repackaging their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day if you could keep awake but of course you can't you would see your own mother doing this and you would find it very interesting to watch her it is quite like tidying up drawers you would see her on her knees i expect lingering humorously over some of your contents wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up making discoveries sweet or not so sweet pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten and hurriedly stowing that out of sight when you wake up in the morning the naughtiness and evil past passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top beautifully aired are spread out on your prettier thoughts ready to put on um it also talks about the neverland as being different for every child so is it a real place or is it a place children go in their imaginations who knows um the book says on page 11 our neverlands vary a good deal john's for instance had a lagoon with flamingos flying over it at which john was shooting while michael who was very small had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it and then it goes on a little bit and says neverlands have a family resemblance and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have each other's nose and so forth on these magic shores children at play are forever beaching their coracles we too have been there we can still hear the sound of the surf though we shall land there no more and then my i think it's a little humorous because it goes on and reads of all delectable islands the neverland is the snuggest and most compact not large and sprawly you know with tedious distances between one adventure and another but nicely crammed when you play at it by day with the chairs and the tablecloth it is not in the least alarming but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very nearly real that is why there are night lights and i think that's so funny because you can remember as a child you know telling scary stories ghost stories to each other having fun playing at all kinds of wacky adventures and they're fine and they're all well and fun during the day but as soon as you cut out the light at night man those stories come back to you and keep you awake so now we get to get into the part that i think is the most fun and this is a theory that probably doesn't all add up but that i think is fun to play around with about peter pan and captain hook specifically so i have this theory that peter pan and captain hook are actually the same mind the same character and the same person and with their at their time in neverland and i believe that hook is the part of peter that is threatening to grow up um the part of peter that is wanting to grow up and so the grown up part of peter so captain hook constantly talks in the latter part of the book about his days at eaton i don't know if it's eaten or etened i'm not british so i'm not positive but he talks about his days at this famous school and how the thing that stuck with him most about the school was good form essentially being grown up being a gentleman being in good form and so he embodies kind of this maturity this grown upness even in his cruelty whereas peter is bad for him peter is cocky peter is reckless he is everything that is bad for him he is childhood and innocent and immaturity so one thing you should know about peter pan is that he doesn't necessarily like not being able to grow up he is insistent that he doesn't want to grow up but we're not entirely convinced that that is what is best for him is to stay a child forever once again is it talking about death as a child um you know being not a good thing maybe maybe so um but we do hear in the book about peter having some very troubling dreams which could be related to his inability to grow up and here's a description of that on page 115 sometimes though not often he peter had dreams and they were more painful than the dreams of the other boys for hours he could not be separated from these dreams so he wailed piteously in him um the introduction described this as like the riddle of his existence the fact that he must go on and on and on and on living and time must pass but he can never grow up whereas hook is described as seeing peter as something entirely different what stayed hook was peter's impertinent appearance as he slept the open mouth the drooping arm the arch knee they were such a personification of cockiness as taken together will never again make will never again one may hope be presented i so sensitive to their offensiveness they steal hook's heart if his rage had broken him into a hundred pieces every one of them would have disregarded the incident and leapt at the sleeper so as the conflict between hook and peter goes on hook is very offended by peter's youth and cockiness and joy and recklessness on page 135 hitherto um cook had thought that he had some fiend fighting him but darker suspicions assailed him now pan who and what art thou he cried huskily i'm youth i'm joy peter answered adventure i'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg so is hook the part of peter's conscience that thinks it needs to grow up and therefore resents his eternal childhood that's my theory and of course spoiler alert in the end of the story peter is the one who is victorious over hook but if hook had been victorious over peter would we have seen peter become free to grow up that's a good question to ask i think um because since peter does win he of course goes on living and goes on living as an eternal child which once again it is made very unclear in the book whether this is a blessing or a curse in the book peter also has one of his terrible upsetting dreams the night after he kills hook it says on page 138 he had one of his dreams that night and he cried in his sleep for a long time is he crying because he is now cursed still to eternal childhood whereas if hook had been victorious and allowed peter the freedom to grow up that wouldn't have been the case if we're going to go along with this theory then i'm going to assume that the part of peter's consciousness that is hook that is growing up is also afraid at the same time to grow up because peter wants to be a boy forever and i think then that the character of tick-tock the crocodile becomes very significant because think about it this crocodile is the only thing that captain hook is afraid of is the crocodile that peter fed hook's arm to when he got into a um conflict with hook earlier like before the story started um but the thing is the crocodile ticks he ticks like a clock he has a clock inside and that is constantly ticking is that the passage of time that so threatens a child into adulthood maybe here's a quote from the book about how hook was afraid of tick-tock crocodile um he's talking to smee and he says peter flung my arm hook said wincing to a crocodile that happened to be passing by i have often noticed me noticed your strange dread of crocodiles not a crocodile's hook corrected him but of that one crocodile he lowered his voice it locked my arm so much to me that it has followed me ever since from sea to sea and from land to land licking its lips for the rest of me smee he said huskily that crocodile would have had me before this but by a lucky chance it swallowed a clock which goes tick tick inside it and before it can reach me i hear the tick and bolt is he afraid of the passage of time because that is what would make him grow going along with this theory um later in the story at the scene of the ultimate conflict between peter and hook something very interesting happens this crocodile stops ticking and peter begins doing the ticking himself um i don't know quite what to make of that but i do think that there's something there to unpack i want to read you some of the quote some of the um excerpts that um relate to this particular instance so um oh age 127 excuse me on page 127 um jm barry writes he had seen the crocodile and he is referring to peter he had seen the crocodile pass by without noticing anything peculiar about it but by and by he remembered that it had not been ticking anymore at first he thought this eerie but soon he concluded rightly that the clock had run down um and then it goes on and peter says in the middle of this um little narrative here as he swam he had but one thought hook or me this time and then it goes on and says the crocodile no sooner did peter remember it than he heard the ticking at first he thought the sound did come from the crocodile and he looked behind him swiftly then he realized that he was doing it himself is peter in danger of growing up here is he in danger of being defeated by hook that's kind of what i'm getting from this part of the story what are some themes in this book well i think i've already covered some of them i think that there is the theme that is the question is eternal childhood a blessing or a curse um and i think that especially when we look at that in light of all of the loss of children that j.m barry had in his life that becomes a very interesting question i also think that this book is ultimately a story about the goodness of growing up neverland is a dark place it is a scary place there are bad things that happen in neverland um we send a romanticized neverland because probably of the magical disney version of peter pan but really in this book there are threats around every single corner childhood is a threatening and vulnerable existence this is ultimately about the goodness of growing up there's even a part of the book that says when talking about wendy after she had grown up wendy was grown up you need not be sorry for her she was one of the kind that likes to grow up in the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than the other girls yet at the same time in this part of the story after wendy has grown up and has a child of her own we do still see peter threatened by the reality of aging um so basically wendy has grown up and peter comes back to visit wendy and finds that she is now an adult and has a child of her own and wendy says to peter i will turn on the light and then you can see for yourself that she's grown up for almost the only time in his life that i know of peter was afraid don't turn on the light he said there's also this theme in the book about kind of the cruelty of childhood a lot of the things that happen in neverland are like children wanting to slay each other and other characters in the story now a lot of that is the play of childhood but what is it about childhood and play um that makes children want to play that they're going to like harm others because that is something that i you know as a kindergarten teacher i see the kids wanting to play shoot at each other and things like that all the time it's probably a lack of recognition of the consequences of a lot of this stuff um but jm barry describes childhood and children as being gay innocent and heartless and as much as i love kids i do think that it's a pretty interesting and maybe accurate description of what kids are like um the story says in on page 100 um let me see when we're children everything is just as it should be you see off we skip like the most heartless things in the world which is what children are but so attractive and we have an entirely selfish time and then when we have need of special attention we notably return for it confident that we shall be rewarded instead of smacked and finally in talking about peter's inability to grow up and his magic and him continuing to visit children as time goes on and these children grow up and have children of their own the book concludes and so it will go on as long as children are gay and innocent and heartless the end so the big question is do i prefer disney's version of peter pan or do i prefer the book version of peter pan that's a hard question to answer because as a person who loves to read i always want to say the book is my favorite and i do think that the book has a depth and a meaning that is not there in the movie however if i have something that i want to sit down and enjoy with a child of my own one day it's going to be the movie version of peter pan i do love the disney magic of peter pan and i don't think that the book has that same fun innocence it is instead a lot darker and a lot deeper so i hope you enjoyed my book review um yeah so like i said this is something a little bit different but it is one of my passions i told my mom earlier today i said this is actually kind of fun i feel like i'm in school again i was one of those nerds that just loved school um so it's kind of fun to have like an assignment to work on for this channel and for these videos i do plan to do this once a month to review a different book that um a disney movie is based off of i have two options for the month of february this was like january's book reviewed in february so i'll review the next book in march but i'm going to read it for the rest of this month um and those two books are either tarzan of the eights or the hunchback of notre dame so please let me know in the comments below which of these two books you think i should review next let me know what your thoughts are about what i had to say in this video let me know your own theories about peter pan have you read the book do you see any of these same things in the disney movie did you enjoy this style of video let me know i hope that you guys are doing great and i hope that you hang on to the good parts of childhood but don't be afraid to grow up and to enjoy life as an adult as well bye bye guys take care

Channel: Dole Whip A Day

Views: 52

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: peter pan, peter pan book, peter pan book review, book, book review, disney, disney book, disney book review, JM Barrie, jm barrie, dole whip

Id: uDH6sh0dotc

Length: 22min 52sec (1372 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021