Hook's Tale
Being the Account of an Unjustly Villainized Pirate Written by Himself
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A rollicking debut novel from award-winning playwright and screenwriter John Pielmeier reimagines the childhood of the much-maligned Captain Hook: his quest for buried treasure, his friendship with Peter Pan, and the story behind the swashbuckling world of Neverland.
Long defamed as a vicious pirate, Captain James Cook (a.k.a. Hook) was in fact a dazzling wordsmith who left behind a vibrant, wildly entertaining, and entirely truthful memoir. His chronicle offers a counter narrative to the works of J.M. Barrie, a “dour Scotsman” whose spurious accounts got it all wrong. Now, award-winning playwright John Pielmeier is proud to present this crucial historic artifact in its entirety for the first time.
Cook’s story begins in London, where he lives with his widowed mother. At thirteen, he runs away from home, but is kidnapped and pressed into naval service as an unlikely cabin boy. Soon he discovers a treasure map that leads to a mysterious archipelago called the “Never-Isles” from which there appears to be no escape. In the course of his adventures he meets the pirates Smee and Starkey, falls in love with the enchanting Tiger Lily, adopts an oddly affectionate crocodile, and befriends a charming boy named Peter—who teaches him to fly. He battles monsters, fights in mutinies, swims with mermaids, and eventually learns both the sad and terrible tale of his mother’s life and the true story of his father’s disappearance.
Like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, Hook’s Tale offers a radical new version of a classic story, bringing readers into a much richer, darker, and enchanting version of Neverland than ever before. The characters that our hero meets—including the terrible Doctor Uriah Slinque and a little girl named Wendy—lead him to the most difficult decision of his life: whether to submit to the temptation of eternal youth, or to embrace the responsibilities of maturity and the inevitability of his own mortality. His choice, like his story, is not what you might expect.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Pielmeier's rollicking version of a familiar story, Peter Pan is a far cry from J.M. Barrie's charming hero. The hero in this iteration is Hook, otherwise known as James Cook, descendant of the famous captain of the same name. Pielmeier claims to have found Hook's memoirs, in which he recounts losing his beloved mother, getting kicked out of Eton, and being press-ganged at age 14 onto a ship heading to the Caribbean. In possession of a treasure map that has something to do with his absent father, also a ship's captain, Cook and his crew mutiny and go in search of fortune, ending up in the vicinity of the time-bent realm of Never-Isle. Here Cook encounters Peter, a lonely, self-absorbed boy who has ceased to age. Cook, too, stops growing older for a time. In his adventures on Never-Isle, he saves the life of the princess Tiger Lily, who then chooses him to be her husband, much to the chagrin of Tinkerbell, who also loves him. In this version, Cook doesn't fear the crocodile who ticks; rather he has raised and cared for the creature who swallowed his father's pocket watch, naming it after his mother, Daisy. When Peter betrays Cook and Tiger Lily, Cook sets out to discover his own identity back in the land of the living. What he finds, including who the Darlings (from the canonical story) really are, and how he ends up with a hook for a hand, satisfyingly upend all the familiar elements of Barrie's children's story. A splendid yarn.
