10 books like Peter and Wendy

The original boy wizard with a scar, A Wizard of Earthsea is a fantasy novel that has influenced writers to this day.

Sparrow Hawk/Ged is a boy with a lot of power and pride. As a result of both, he releases a great evil into the world which he has to defeat. It is a cautionary tale of the need to know thyself, and the dragons are a nice touch.

A video game treasure hunt filled with movie geek trivia? Sign me up.

I don’t know a single person who’s read this book and has been disappointed. Set in a not-too-distant future, this YA sci-fi novel is a fun and fast read that’s even better than the movie. 

I love how the plot, and the video game treasure hunt, are propelled forward by movie and pop culture references. This really spoke to me as a reader who loves that stuff, and showed me how I could use the same type of film references in my own book. 

I know, I know. But this is essential stuff. The grandfather of the genre.

There might be no truly fantastical elements here, but the list doesn’t demand it – what we have is an iconic pirate adventure, such that spurred the imaginations of generations, as well as all those books, films, shows, and games we’ve come to love.

Give thanks to Treasure Island for Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, and Black Sails, and the legendary... Muppet’s Treasure Island.

If you haven’t read it, then please do explore this incredibly influential tale of buccaneers and buried gold. Treasure maps dotted with an X? A parrot on the shoulder of a man with one leg? It all starts here. Yes, it’s an old book – but that means little, and you probably won’t even notice much difference to modern-day stories. It’s timeless.

C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is a captivating tale of adventure and wonder that has had generations of children—myself included— imagining themselves in Narnia right beside Lucy, Edmund, and Aslan.

It presents big concepts like good versus evil, personal sacrifice, betrayal, forgiveness, and redemption in an engaging and whimsical way, inviting children to consider deep spiritual matters while exploring the land and creatures of Narnia.

With talking animals, magical creatures, and four children having the adventure of their lives, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe offers something for everyone in the family.

Richard Hughes has always been my favorite under-read author. I tell people he writes as though he were the love child of A. A. Milne and Joseph Conrad.

A High Wind begins in an idyllic Caribbean setting, with the five Thornton and two Fernandez children living in what seems to be pre-lapsarian innocence; but Hughes soon plunks them square into the world of “Typhoon” and Lord Jim.

There are hellacious hurricanes and swashbuckling pirates involved, but it’s the pirates that are finally defenseless in the face of the children they unluckily take on board from an England-bound passenger ship. Time and time again, Hughes captures the bizarre ways in which children see the world, just as often warped by imagination as consolidated by fact.

I’m struck by the way his empathy for his characters never guarantees that their fate in his hands will be anything other than brutal.

If there’s anything I like as much as pirates, it’s heist stories. The excellent follow-up to the amazing Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas rang every one of my bells by taking our favorite thieving bastards Locke and Jean to sea, under the command of a strong, brilliant female captain, Zamira Drakasha. And she’s not just a woman pirate – she’s a middle-aged, Black single mother, running her ship and being the best pirate any denizen of the high seas could aspire to be. Lynch caught a good bit of flack for this character, but I was delighted. You will be, too.

I must start, of course, with the quintessential pirate fantasy book.

Many might not be aware that the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film was loosely adapted from this 1987 novel by Tim Powers. Anybody who knows the genre and is asked for a pirate fantasy book most likely brings up this one first. It’s the clearest yet expression of a rarified genre, and something with few imitators.

Expect to be entertained with high-seas piracy, ship battles, jungles, dark voodoo, ghost ships, and zombies as you follow Jack Shandy on the quest for the Fountain of Youth. Blackbeard, played wonderfully by Ian McShane in the film, proves a foreboding antagonist with supernatural designs.

This may be a strange pick for some, but it is one of my favourite stories. It's something I grew up with and is very influential and inspirational to me.

The crew of the Going Merry become like family, not just on the pages but also personally. Ask anyone who loves One Piece, and they will tell you that they feel attached to the characters as if they're real. You get to see them overcoming adversity and loss, and with the help of their found family, they keep moving towards their dreams over and over again.

The author creates a world where it feels like anything can happen and yet still remains grounded in that world. Given a chance, I would go there in a heartbeat, provided I can join the crew of the future Pirate King.

Okay, this isn’t exactly about pirates, but it is about children who play at pirating and whose summer adventures with an author named Barrie inspired him to write his play Peter Pan. The children were George, Jack, Peter (and later Michael and Nico) Llewelyn-Davis, and they became the center of Barrie’s creative life. “I have no recollection of having written Peter Pan,” he later wrote. “He belongs rather to the five without whom he never would have existed and the play is streaky with them still. I suppose I made him by rubbing the five of them violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. That is all he is, the spark I got from my boys.”

When I first read this book I had to put it down at the end of nearly every chapter – because I was sobbing and my tears made it impossible… show more.

This book is about neither pirates nor children, but it belongs on a list about pirates and children nonetheless. It’s certainly a book that children aged eight to eighty (or older) can enjoy, and because the protagonist is a one-legged seaman (Doctor Dogbody) who embodies the spirit of a one-legged pirate (Long John Silver) and a one-handed pirate (Captain James Hook) it deserves mention. Doctor Dogbody is a ship’s surgeon who likes his tipple, and when he’s drained his pint (or two or three) he is happy to tell the tale of how he lost his leg. And every time he tells the tale it’s a completely different saga, each saga more preposterous than the last. This is a laugh-out-loud book which I first discovered via the recommendation of a mountaineer, who would read each chapter aloud to his tent-mates at night while marooned in a snowstorm on the… show more.