We open here with the Dear family, mother and father Colleen and Patrick and son Paul, our protagonist. Thanks to his eccentric father, Paul has been raised on legends of the Anyplace (think Neverland), where lives the ageless Boy (Peter Pan). And in fact he has regular if unsatisfying communications with the Boy via a magic mirror, and also relations with a host of supernatural creatures living in London. Thus, when a family crisis leads Paul to seek a remedy, he is able to find his way to Anyplace with the help of a rescued pixie named Fiddlefix (Tinker Bell).

Once in the Anyplace, Paul finds the Boy impersonating a nasty fellow who was once his worst enemy: Captain Hack (Captain Hook). But the Boy's role as scourge of the seas is more than his usual juvenile playacting. He's been subverted by the shade of his vanquished enemy and fallen under the sway of the female Captain Slash, Hack's equally bad pirate sister. The Boy has even forsaken his beloved Gwenny (Wendy Darling).

It's up to Paul to restore Anyplace and the Boy to their majestic moral rightness, as well as to seek the solution to his domestic problems back in London. But such a quest is hardly guaranteed of success, and it will involve great sacrifices all around.

Timeless yet pertinent retro adventures

Pulling off a new adventure with one of the most beloved characters in fantasy literature is like walking a greased tightrope over a shark pool. One slip and you'll plummet to be torn to shreds by bloodthirsty readers offended by your mishandled misappropriations. But Peter David has the chops—and the sensitivity and vision—to bring off such a feat with hardly a single misstep.

First off, as he reveals in a press-kit interview, he had the inspiration to create a new hero, Paul Dear, aka Tigerheart, on whom the spotlight could focus. Rather than riskily inhabit Peter Pan's consciousness and place that icon center stage (as matters go now, Peter/the Boy is crucial to the plot, but not central), he develops a new hero with his own concerns, attitudes and experience. This allows the reader to accept new adventures more open-heartedly.

Second, David makes a supreme effort to re-inhabit both the style and worldview of the original. This results in a very old-fashioned tone and voice and narrative shaping that does not betray the original, but rather reinforces what we liked best about it.

But—and this is a vital but—there simply has to be a new, 21st-century slant and subtext, however understated—or else why bother doing it at all? David achieves this with subtlety by such strategies as having Paul under psychiatric care and prescription drug intervention to relieve him of his "fantasies." But there's no heavy-handed attempt to tart the tale up with, say, pop music and modern politics and irony. In fact, David carefully keeps his milieu free-floating, so that the tale can be conceived of as happening anytime. He also underpins the logic of Anyplace with science-fictional rigor, more so than Barrie ever did. The result is the same kind of atmosphere as William Goldman's The Princess Bride (1973).

As for the adventures themselves, they are suitably stimulating and unpredictable and satisfying to our demands for both thrills and archetypical justice. Paul is an admirable hero, neither smarmily perfect nor fatally damaged. David manages to dig at the implications of Barrie's cosmos and original characters in novel ways—though I must say I don't recall the original Tinker Bell swearing quite as much as Fiddlefix!