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The Bridge to Never Land
Unavailable
The Bridge to Never Land
Unavailable
The Bridge to Never Land
Audiobook10 hours

The Bridge to Never Land

Written by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

Narrated by MacLeod Andrews

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

Aidan and Sarah Cooper have no idea what they're getting into one afternoon when they discover a mysterious coded document in a secret compartment of an antique English desk their father recently bought at an auction. Something about the document seems familiar to Sarah, and that night she realizes what it is: the document seems to be referring to some books she has read-the Starcatchers series, about the origin of Peter Pan. But how could that be? The document seems far older than the books. And of course, the books are just stories.…

Curious, Sarah and Aidan begin to decipher the mysterious document. At first it's a game-unraveling the mystery piece by piece, each piece leading them to a new, deeper puzzle.

But soon the game turns strange-and scary. They discover that the "stories" are real, and that what they thought was a fictional battle between good and evil is still going on. And the scariest part is: they have become part of it.

Pursued by a being that can take any form and will stop at nothing to get what it wants from them, Aidan and Sarah embark on a desperate, thrilling quest for help-a quest that leads them to some unforgettable people in some unlikely places, including one that's not supposed to exist at all. At each step they must solve new puzzles and escape new dangers, all the while knowing that if they fail, the evil they are fleeing will be let loose on an unsuspecting world.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 9, 2011
ISBN9781455828081
Unavailable
The Bridge to Never Land
Author

Dave Barry

DAVE BARRY is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor writer and bestselling author whose work has appeared in hundreds of newspapers.

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Reviews for The Bridge to Never Land

Rating: 4.260869565217392 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

23 ratings8 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Quick read. A fun book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sarah and Aidan Cooper discover a cryptic message in an antique desk that leads them to a cave guarded by wolves outside of London, to a physics professor at Princeton, to a Peter Pan ride in Disneyworld, and finally to Never Land in an alternate universe. All of this came about because they found a gold box filled with starstuff, a magical substance that makes people fly, which an evil being named Ombra wants desperately.I gave this four stars because I believe that lots of kids will like it. However, I was not terribly interested. I thought it was a half-hearted endeavor that used lots of lazy devices to propel the story forward. It was all about the action, not the writing. It also was a blatant plug of the previous books in this Starcatcher series, done in a slightly icky way.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Normally I love this series, but this one was so full of modern references and Disney plugs that it was off putting. In 20 years people aren't going to remember what an Ipad was or facebook or any of the other hundreds of "modern" details that seemed to dominate the plot and text. The only really interesting part of the book was when they were in Neverland, and that didn't happen until about 3/4 of the way through and only lasted for a few chapters. The wonderful thing about this series is that it is charming, imaginitive and timeless, all things that this book lacks.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    When Sarah and Aiden find a mysterious note they go on a quest, and find themselves in possession of star-stuff and hunted by the evil Ombra. They decide that they must find the starcatchers and travel to Never Land to stash the stuff safely.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Good, exciting read, mostly aimed at younger readers, but with enough material for adults to keep them interested.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read this story aloud to my 9 year old daughter...we are fans of the "Peter and the Starcatchers" series and really looked forward to this book.

    I have to say that it is very different than the previous series. I found the idea of this wonderfully rich and detailed world that explained how Peter and the Lost Boys came to be in Never Land, and where exactly Captain Hook came from, to be absolutely wonderful. We were enthralled throughout all of the first four books. This story was engaging, humorous and entertaining...but it wasn't quite as enticing or engrossing as the previous books were.

    While this book is sort of a sequel to the "Peter and the Starcatchers" books, it isn't really a sequel to the last book. It is more of a sequel to all of them as a group. In this book, we get an entirely different cast of characters at first. For the majority of the book none of the characters we grew to love and root for in the past books are involved. While it is interesting to see the difference between how children of today's world would have to deal with the adventures in protecting Starstuff from the evil Ombra as compared to Molly and Peter, for me the story lost something in the transition to modern day.

    The book did pick up once the children were able to get to Peter, but for some reason it really bothered me that both children didn't get to experience Never Land. Additionally, the tie-in between Disney publishing this book and the fact that a very large amount of the story is set at Disney World got to be a bit old after a while. It sort of felt like I was reading a constant commercial for DisneyWorld.

    Overall, my daughter and I both did enjoy the book, however not nearly as much as the previous books in the series. I think this was largely because of how much we missed the interaction and obvious caring between Peter and Molly.

    Perhaps the very brilliant Misters Barry and Pearson could, rather than continuing to write in this universe, mine another fairy tale or story for a similar sort of "if you only knew the truth" backstory? What really happened in "Alice in Wonderland", or "Sleeping Beauty"? What was the 'truth' behind "Rapunzel"? I'd love to see what else they could come up with.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Summary: When messing around with their father's antique desk, fifteen-year-old Aiden and seventeen-year-old Sarah Cooper find a piece of paper with strange and cryptic instructions. On their family vacation to London, they figure out that the paper is related to the Peter and the Starcatchers books, but that the books are not fiction, but a historical record of the real Starcatchers, and that Starstuff itself is very real. Now they've got their hands on what is probably the last Starstuff remaining on Earth, but they've also awakened the Starcatchers' ancient enemy, Lord Ombra, who is pursuing them. In order to keep themselves and their family safe, they must find a way to dispose of the Starstuff, a quest which will take them from England, to Princeton University, and eventually all the way to Disney World… and possibly even further.Review: I tried to be my normal level of "no spoilers past the first third of the book" cagey in my summary, but honestly: it's kind of pointless in this case. For one thing, the title is The Bridge to Never Land, so you know that they are eventually going to find, y'know, a bridge to Never Land. For another thing, though, this book is so formulaic that the concept of spoilers doesn't even really apply. Right off the bat, it's pretty obvious how things are going to shake out, at least in general terms. But for the truly spoiler-phobic, you may want to skip the rest of my review, because one of my biggest problems with this book were the plot holes, and I'm going to talk about them in some specifics.Okay, so, before I get into the plot holes, I do want to say that this book had interesting potential, and some of the ideas it contained were really great. I like the idea of tying advanced physics into a children's book; instead of having everything be due to magic, in this case, the problem was solved by science (that used the magic as a power source, because: of course). But the thing I loved most about this book was the idea of having Peter Pan, the actual Peter Pan, who hasn't been to our world since Victorian London, show up in Disney World and be confronted with the Disney-ified version of himself and his story. Peter Pan is one of my favorite characters, and has been since I was three, and I am just tickled with the idea of the actual Peter Pan looking at the cartoon, or the snow globes and toys and glow-in-the-dark Tinkerbell wands, or the Disney cast member dressed up like him in the parade, and being like "…the hell?!?" Barry and Pearson don't run with this as much as I think they could have, but they at least plant the idea, which I loved.But, unfortunately, Peter doesn't show up until relatively late in the book; most of it is taken up by Aiden and Sarah (and the physicist and Starcatcher-descendent J.D. Astor), and they're not so awesome. I'm not a fan of the decision to make the protagonists in their late teens; it maybe makes their exploits a little more believable than had they been doing all this as eleven-year-olds, but neither Aiden nor Sarah really acted their age, and I didn't find either of them particularly interesting or well-rounded characters. This probably wasn't helped by the audiobook production - I can't tell if the characters read as really young, or if MacLeod Andrews read them as really young, if that makes sense, but they came off as juvenile and annoying a lot of the time. They were also irritatingly dense a whole lot of the time. (What fifteen-year-old with a smart phone doesn't understand the basic concept of GPS?) But it was particularly annoying when it came to their constant denials that ____ was real. So, you followed clues in a fiction book and it lead you to a real place with a pathway marked as stars. But then the stuff you find by following that pathway can't possibly be Starstuff, because Starstuff is fiction. Well, okay, maybe it is Starstuff, but surely the OTHER fictional stuff from the book can't be real, because it's fiction. Over and over again. Also, there is an awful lot of time spent once they get to Disney World timing the Peter Pan's Flight ride so that they can get to the right part to open the bridge at exactly the right time, but oh no, they can't reach from the car of the ride, etc… and the whole time they seem to forget that they have a magic box full of stuff that can make them fly. A lot of the story feels just like that: manufactured problems created by the author not because they fit the story, but just for added drama.There's also, as you may have been able to tell, some manufactured advertising for Disney that permeates most of this book. The meta-ness of the characters having read the previous Starcatchers books (and they were Sarah's favorites, of course), yeah, okay, I'll let that slide. And I realize that Disney owns Hyperion, and Pearson at least writes a bunch of Disney-themed stuff, so I shouldn't be so surprised, and it wasn't as bad as it could have been. But it still felt like a not particularly subtle ad for visiting the park, which was kind of gross. It was also part of the forced modernity of this book that made it so much less charming than its predecessors. Actually, "forced" is a good word all around. The action moved quickly, which kept me involved in the story, but a lot of aspects of it just felt off. 3 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: I'd skip it, honestly. It's tolerably entertaining, but it's not nearly up to the standard set by the earlier Starcatchers books.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    When Sarah and Aiden find a mysterious note they go on a quest, and find themselves in possession of star-stuff and hunted by the evil Ombra. They decide that they must find the starcatchers and travel to Never Land to stash the stuff safely.