OKAY if you're here for my Arcane yapping (90% of you are and that's totally reasonable and normal because I am An Arcane Blog) then maybe don't read this because it's going to be nostalgic yapping—but if you want to hear me yell about a book series that I read when I was in my early teens and still love then stick around
So I'm re-reading Peter and the Starcatchers at the moment (I read it first when I was like 13-15) and, to my genuine surprise, it is just as good if not better than I remember.
If you haven't read the series let me sell it to you okay: the first book is essentially explaining the origin of Peter Pan—how he and the Lost Boys ended up on Neverland, why Neverland is called that, and why the island is magical and filled with pirates and mermaids and fairies etc. Literally when the story starts Peter and the Lost Boys are some random kids from England, and Neverland is a random normal island with a different name, and over the course of the first book everything changes.
The premise of the whole series boiled down is this: Pixie Dust (it's not called that in the series but I'll call it that for the sake of clarity) is actually bits of magic meteorites and is terrifyingly powerful/valuable. Much like in the world of Harry Potter, there's an underground network of people who live in society and just know about this magic, but are supposed to keep it secret. There are Starcatchers and the Others, one side that wants to make sure Pixie Dust is inaccessible to anyone and everyone including themselves, and the Others, who want to use it to live forever and control whole countries.
It's considerably darker than I remember (not enough to drive it too deep into YA but definitely darker than your average Narnia book) and contains some decent commentary on forcible colonization and racism, especially in the first book. The darker parts usually revolve around people's shadows being taken, which is a whole plot device with lowkey terrifying cause and effect.
Disney already owns these books. They're like 500-600 pages each and there's 5 of them—WHY isn't Disney making them into films or something?? If yall are running out of ideas just use the ones you forgot about years ago and left to collect dust lmfao
Anyway yap over but 9/10 series adore the writing style even though it very obviously is made for people around the 12-15 age range