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Stardust by Neil Gaiman (1999)
Aug. 17th, 2007 05:37 pmA village boy in Victorian England sees a falling star, and makes a rash promise to his beloved that he will bring it back to her. The journey takes him deep into faerie and entangles him with a succession battle, a peddler and a captive slave, and a powerfully evil witch also seeking the star. And as for that star, something which is just a lump of rock and metal in our world is, in faerie, a beautiful (and rather irritable) girl who’s just taken a nasty tumble.
Okay, confession, and don’t throw stones or anything: I’m not actually, you know, that into Gaiman. I mean, I adore Good Omens, but that’s a joint work and quite different from his usual stuff. And his usual stuff is . . . you know there’s nothing wrong with it, but it just doesn’t do much of anything for me.
Case in point, this pretty fairy tale for grown-ups. I do like these sorts of stories which haven’t had the spice of sexuality and violence sanitized out for the kiddies, and Gaiman writes with a deceptive simplicity that makes the prose almost invisible.
But I just didn’t care. The magic was occasionally kind of neat, and there were a few delightful references, but I never engaged beyond the very surface.
Gently charming, a bit wry, noticeably lacking in interesting female characters (though to be fair, I didn’t really find anyone interesting), a bit oddly paced through the middle. Probably more fun on the big screen, and how often do I say that?
Okay, confession, and don’t throw stones or anything: I’m not actually, you know, that into Gaiman. I mean, I adore Good Omens, but that’s a joint work and quite different from his usual stuff. And his usual stuff is . . . you know there’s nothing wrong with it, but it just doesn’t do much of anything for me.
Case in point, this pretty fairy tale for grown-ups. I do like these sorts of stories which haven’t had the spice of sexuality and violence sanitized out for the kiddies, and Gaiman writes with a deceptive simplicity that makes the prose almost invisible.
But I just didn’t care. The magic was occasionally kind of neat, and there were a few delightful references, but I never engaged beyond the very surface.
Gently charming, a bit wry, noticeably lacking in interesting female characters (though to be fair, I didn’t really find anyone interesting), a bit oddly paced through the middle. Probably more fun on the big screen, and how often do I say that?