Dawn’s Thoughts

Before I get back to my review of No Pity, I want to review the book Peter & Max: A Fables Novel by Bill Willingham. I saw this book, along with The Child Thief: A Novel by Brom, at the local comic book store. Both had been written by comic book authors, and both were illustrated. I was interested, in part because the first comic book author novel I read there turned out to be one of the funniest books I’ve read, and the other a Niel Gaiman book with plenty of folklore in it. So I was willing to give them a try.

I read them, and having finished Peter and Max, have decided that I like it best. Both books did folkloric research, which is obvious when you read them — Brom’s fairies, and fairy land, like J.M. Barrie’s, is dark and somewhat frightening, certainly not the land created by Disney. This is all well and good, since there is a tradition with Grimm’s Fairy Tales et al., that a lot of violence happens in fairy tales. The Child Thief is clever in creating a Peter Pan who is a trickster, who only wants children to support warfare, and who doesn’t really care what happens to them — in fact, in this respect as a “new” Peter Pan novel, I like it better than others I’ve seen meant for children. The explanation of why and how the story was created is worth rereading. I enjoyed the idea that children would have to adjust to being kidnapped and brought to Neverland, that Captain Hook was a kind man with children of his own, and that he was plagued by reverends straight out of the Salem Witch Trials. That being said, like The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly, this book is excessively violent. But I could, at times with difficulty, ignore the violence in The Book of Lost Things in favor of a clever story rooted in folklore, I found it much harder with The Child Thief. For one thing, this book is longer. For another, by the time I got near the end I was growing tired of it. The magic that happens makes sense, and is set up well, as is the ending, but even the people meant to be friendly turn angry and mean, even the Devils (Brom’s name for the Lost Boys). I loved the fact that Peter Pan is a changeling, and felt that his parent’s response was well done, and that he is adopted and trained by creatures in the forest. There are moments in Peter’s training that are quite good, before violence once again comes into the story. Although at times, the violence is appropriate and makes sense in the story — for instance that Peter needs to be without a family — and there are echoes of the original Peter Pan (”I’m a Peterbird,” says Peter, what the Lost Boys will call Wendy in Barrie’s version), I was glad when the story ended. The illustrations are good, if somewhat superhero/fantasy-like for my taste.