By Neil Gaiman
Hopelessly crossed in love, a boy of half-fairy parentage
leaves his mundane Victorian-English village on a quest for a fallen star in
the magical realm. The star proves to be an attractive woman with a hot temper,
who plunges with our hero into adventures featuring witches, the lion and the
unicorn, plotting elf-lords, ships that sail the sky, magical transformations,
curses whose effects rebound, binding conditions with hidden loopholes and all
the rest.
Neil Gaiman is amazing, in case you didn’t know…but this
book kinda fell flat for me. For one thing it had a seeming random triste
between one of the princes and a bar-maid that was a bit too much for my
sensitivities to handle, as well as a love scene right off the bat from which
our hero is the outcome. Cue awkward feelings. I read this because I enjoyed
the movie adaptation so much. I’ve had to warn people that I recommended the
movie to about the content of the book in case they were eyeing it, because
they feel the way I do about “adult content”. That being said, normally I appreciate
Gaiman’s dry wit and clever creativity in his writing, but this just seem dry
with too little wit and I found myself reading it without my accustomed
excitement for one of his books. I just didn’t fancy this one Neil, sorry. If
you like fantasy and loveliness, try one of Neil’s other books like The
Graveyard Book, or Odd and the Frost Giants. I loved both, but those are young
adult genres, so maybe it’s just that I love Neil’s younger audience books?
I’ve got a few of his adult books in my reading queue so I’ll let you know how
those go!
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