Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J. M. Barrie

I really love and have always loved Peter Pan (or, more correctly, Peter and Wendy), it's just one of those books that only gets better as you get older. I read it when I was very little, and I read it two years ago (and several times inbetween), and it never disappoints. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is a kind of alternate Peter Pan story, it had a lot of the same themes and even the same stories, but it lacks the narrative and coherence of Peter and Wendy. It's very short and full of the same delightful and sparklingly inventive games with words and ideas that Barrie plays in Peter and Wendy. It's more of a 'quaint' Victorian fairy tale, it has something of the totally bewildering character of At the Back of the North Wind (which I never understood the appeal of). It also has a really incongruous but fascinating tragic aspect in the story of Peter's mother locking him out and the deaths of children. I think that it's much more plain in this book that the adventures in an alternative universe involve death or near-death experiences; some children are recovered, but many never return to their parents, presumably carried off by an illness. Barrie succeeds wonderfully in projecting the spatial conceptions of childhood on the real world, I don't think I'll ever look at Kensington Gardens the same way again, although I'm never likely to be as fond of them as I am of Regent's Park, I think this book made me like them much more.