Tigerheart by Peter David

Tigerheart is the story of a boy named Paul Dear – Paul was raised with his father’s stories of the Anyplace, where pixies and pirates and tigers roam free, and where The Boy of Legend rules supreme. His mother always regarded these stories with benevolent tolerance at best. But Paul’s life – indeed, his whole concept of the world – changes when an unexpected tragedy strikes his family. To make his mother happy again, Paul follows Fiddlefix the Pixie into the Anyplace, and so the greatest adventure of his life begins.

As you most likely realized by now, Tigerheart is a reinvention of Barrie’s classic, Peter Pan. It’s an intelligent, warm and humorous reinvention that is both immediately familiar and strikingly new. It manages to evoke a classic while being its own thing at the same time.

Characters that will ring a bell with a great number of readers include The Boy himself, the aforementioned Fiddlefix, a girl named Gweeny, The Vagabonds, and the dreaded Captain Hack, who has a hatchet for a hand, among others. And these changed names are more than just a whimsy. They signal a changed approach – the Anyplace is Neverland, and yet it is not Neverland. Peter David approaches the story of the boy who didn’t want to grow up from a unique angle.

Just recently, when posting about The Enchanted Castle, I mentioned that conversational and interventive narrators could either work really well or go horribly wrong for me. Tigerheart has one of those narrators, but fortunately it worked really, really well. The voice that tells this story, like the story itself, is reminiscent of Barrie’s, but is not quite Barrie’s. There’s more sarcasm, for starters. There’s also more humour – in fact, there were several passages that made me laugh out loud, something I don’t think had happened since I last read a Terry Pratchett book.

Tigerheart is a humorous and adventurous story, but it’s also more than that. It’s a story about loss and sorrow, courage and love, what it means to grow up – and this is where it distances itself from Barrie’s tale the most – the power of the imagination, and the things one shouldn’t give up.

In an interview at the end of the book, Peter David explains, among other things, how the process of retelling familiar stories is akin to the building of modern myths. It’s something we need, something we’ve always done and continue to do. I find this a particularly interesting idea, and Tigerheart is a perfect illustration of how characters that populate our collective imaginations can be used to tell a story that is both familiar and completely unique.

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