Peter and the Starcatchers

September's book for Great Reads for Girls is Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. This book will be featured at our Wednesday, September 8 meeting at 7 p.m. 

Join us for a night of pirates, treasure hunts, discussion and treats!

Pulitzer Prize winning humorist Dave Barry, best selling mystery writer Ridley Pearson, and illustrator Greg Call have combined their talents to create a series of prequels to the J.M. Barrie classic Peter Pan. This is the first of those stories. The result is a fast-paced and fluffy pirate adventure, complete with talking porpoises, stinky rogues, possible cannibals, a flying crocodile, biting mermaids, and a much-sought-after trunk full of magical glowing green "starstuff." Ever hear of Zeus? Michelangelo? Attila the Hun? According to 14-year-old Molly Aster they all derived their powers from starstuff that occasionally falls to Earth from the heavens. On Earth, it is the Starcatchers' job to rush to the scene and collect the starstuff before it falls into the hands of the Others who use its myriad powers for evil.

On board the ship Never Land, an orange-haired boy named Peter, the leader of a group of orphaned boys being sent off to work as servants in King Zarboff the Third's court, is puzzled by his shipmate Molly's fantastical story of starstuff, but it inextricably binds him to her. Peter vows to help his new, very pretty friend Molly (a Starcatcher's apprentice) keep a mysterious trunk full of the stuff out of the clutches of the pirate Black Stache, a host of other interested parties, and ultimately King Zarboff the Third.

Greg Call's wonderful black-and-white illustrations are deliciously old-fashioned and add plenty of atmosphere to a silly, swashbuckling story that shows us how Peter Pan came to fly and why he, and his story, will never get old.

                                                        Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson are longtime friends but Peter and the Starcatchers is their first writing collaboration and the first time either of them have written literature for children. They loved working on this book series together. Dave and Ridley also play together - in a band that is.  Dave plays lead guitar and Ridley plays bass guitar in the literary all-star garage band, the Rock Bottom Remainders. The band is comprised of some of America's favorite authors. 

Dave is a Pulitzer Prize-winning nationally syndicated humor columnist for the Miami Herald. His column appears in more than 500 newspapers in the United States and abroad.  He is also the author of more than 20 books. Dave went to Haverford College where he was an English major. He now lives in Miami, Florida with his wife Michelle, a sportswriter. He has a son, Rob, and a daughter, Sophie.

Ridley Pearson has also written over 20 novels.  He likes to write books that are frightening and suspenseful.  He grew up in Riverside, Connecticut.  In 1991 he was the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction at Oxford University. Ridley, his wife Marcelle and their two daughters now divide their time between the Northern Rockies and the midwest.