content warnings:

Spoiler

on-page character death(s), drowning, violence & threats of violence, child abuse

Though I generally don't like to gender stories, this just feels so much like a Boy Book? Peter has a lot of heteronormative attitudes, and the narrative focuses on action and humor almost to the exclusion of character development or moral/intellectual themes. There's also an obligatory budding romance, though of course it's bookended by disclaimers that Peter is still not totally sold on girls not having cooties and kissing not being the Grossest Thing Ever.

I remember really liking this when I read it back in, like, the very early 2010s; the issue is probably not so much with the book itself as with the years that have passed since — both in terms of my personal preferences and in terms of how literature has changed since then.

For example, it seems there's been a surge in retellings relatively recently; so what middle-school me thought was super creative and clever now has a lot more competition. During this reread I found some of the allusions to the source material to be a bit contrived, mostly related to the effects of starstuff. Rather than any kind of internal logic or system, it felt more like "it just does whatever will let us work in another reference to the original!" See:

Spoiler

a bird exposed to starstuff changing into the fairy Tinker Bell, Peter's inexplicable and rare high tolerance to starstuff granting him immortal youth and permanent flight (which it felt strange for the Starcatchers to immediately accept as fact rather than the unproven theory it was)

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CONVERSION: 5.8 / 15 = 2 stars

Prose: 4 / 10
Characters & Relationships: 4 / 10
Emotional Impact: 2 / 10
Development / Flow: 4 / 10
Setting: 5 / 10

Originality / Trope Execution: 2 / 5
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original rating (sometime between 2010 - 2013): 4 stars