Book Review: Stardust

“A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?  Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now that's a question.” 

 

Less than a week before my ASCP exam.  Fourth night of my seven on.  Bring it on!  That's my life right now.  But I still found the time to do a little reading.  I actually study better when I don't study non-stop.  And that's actually true of the majority of the world, no matter how much we try to fight it.

You know those people who say that the book is always better than the movie?  Well, they're usually right.  But sometimes, you can't make generalizations like that.  This is one of those examples.  The movie was phenomenal.   It was fun, clever and tender.  It was thoroughly enjoyable.  The book was usually so, but the ending was awful.  There's all of this build and potential.  And then, all of the sudden...it ends.

Stardust is about Tristran Thorn (they changed it to Tristan in the movie for ease of pronunciation), who lives in the English country-town of Wall.  There, in a desperate attempt to win over Victoria Forester, he tells her he will do anything if she will give his heart's desire.  As his promises get more and more outlandish, he tells her he will fetch that star that they just saw fall.  She, assuming it will never happen, and that he would never actually try, says that if he fetches her that star, she will give him his heart's desire.  He takes her seriously.  However, after crossing the wall into the land of Faerie, he learns that there, stars are not hunks of rocks, but ladies, this one being one named Yvaine.  And he's not the only one that wants that star.

One thing that I really, really enjoyed about this book is that it's traditional in style.  There is a big push in modern literature to be edgy, and different, and for prose to be inventive.  There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but sometimes it's good to remember that we perhaps tell stories in the classic "There once was a boy named..." format because we like it.  Neil Gaiman has said that he consciously wrote in the English pre-Tolkien fantasy style.

It was fun and imaginative, and I liked it.

The downside was the end.  The villains didn't seem to get their come-uppance at all, the romance seemed to go from "I hate you" to "I love you" without much motivation (or rather the motivation was in the "several weeks passed" phase that got hopped over), and the end seemed to be, "Then they were deadbeats for awhile, before settling down and living happily ever after."  It just seemed anti-climactic to me.

However, it was enjoyable and a good read.  But the movie was actually better.  3 stars to Stardust.