★★★☆☆ The Captain, by Erin Michelle Sky, Steven Brown
Can you have too much Neverland?
The Captain
Erin Michelle Sky, Steven Brown
Can you have too much Neverland?
The Captain is the final novel of Erin Michelle Sky and Steven Brown AKA Dragon Authors' trilogy Tales of the Wendy. I was a little disappointed by this one. It is truly full of wonderful stuff and brilliant ideas and nicely caps (without really finishing, which is a good thing) Wendy's story.
The problem is that there is JUST TOO MUCH. At 414 pages in kindle, The Captain is longer than The Wendy (294 pages) and The Navigator (350 pages), and it felt like it. I was eager to reach the end well before I got there.
Most of the action takes place in the Neverland. Now, in J.M. Barrie's original Peter Pan the Neverland is mostly left to the reader's imagination. One gets the impression that it is one small island inhabited by the Lost Boys, Tiger Lily's Indians, and the Pirates, with some mermaids in the lagoon. In The Captain the Neverland is a vast realm full of all kinds of fantastic peoples and beasts and diverse magics. The plot is complicated -- it holds together, but there is a LOT of story here.
I am not quite sure why this all overwhelmed me. Compared to, say, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tales of the Wendy is brief, and there is less in Dragon Authors' Neverland than there is in Middle Earth. But not a lot less. Perhaps that's the problem. There is just more to the setting and the world than the story needs to carry it.
In the end, Dragon Authors' Neverland reminded me of the Ball Machines of the old West Edmonton Mall. I saw one of the Ball Machines in action at the Edmonton Mall in 1987 -- it was fascinating. But I would not want to read a book about it.