Stardust - Softcover

Gaiman, Neil

4.1

453,270 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380804557 ISBN 13: 9780380804559

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2000

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In the sleepy English countryside of decades past, there is a town that has stood on a jut of granite for six hundred years. And immediately to the east stands a high stone wall, for which the village is named. Here in the town of Wall, Tristran Thorn has lost his heart to the hauntingly beautiful Victoria Forester. One crisp October night, as they watch, a star falls from the sky, and Victoria promises to marry Tristran if he'll retrieve that star and bring it back for her. It is this promise that sends Tristran through the only gap in the wall, across the meadow, and into the most unforgettable adventure of his life.In the sleepy English countryside of decades past, there is a town that has stood on a jut of granite for six hundred years. And immediately to the east stands a high stone wall, for which the village is named. Here in the town of Wall, Tristran Thorn has lost his heart to the hauntingly beautiful Victoria Forester. One crisp October night, as they watch, a star falls from the sky, and Victoria promises to marry Tristran if he'll retrieve that star and bring it back for her. It is this promise that sends Tristran through the only gap in the wall, across the meadow, and into the most unforgettable adventure of his life.

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Review:

The versatile Neil Gaiman is best known for scripting upmarket graphic novels, most famously the lengthy Sandman cycle. Stardust was a joint project with artist Charles Vess, a short novel of fairyland enriched by at least one sumptuous painting on every page. This edition contains only the (slightly rewritten) text, alas. Gaiman's story looks back to days before commercial genre fantasy, to Lord Dunsany's and Hope Mirrlees's visions of Faerie as a misty country which is at the same time temptingly close and "over the hills and far away". The simple tale is new but has a twice-told familiarity, crafted like a mosaic from many traditional elements. 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. Stardust is by turns knowing, poetic, comic and grisly and exudes considerable charm. If only we had those full-colour Vess paintings too. --David Langford

Review:

"[A] beautiful book, and most of all, perfect for all ages."--Desicritics.org on STARDUST

"A charming comic romance."--Dayton Daily News

"A wonderful tale . . . mythic."--Denise Hamilton, Romantic Times BOOKclub

"A twisting, wondrous tale full of magic that only Neil Gaiman could have written."--Chicago Tribune

"Sparkling, fresh, and charming. Superb."--Booklist

"Strange...marvelous...Stardust takes us back to a time when the world was more magical, and, real or not, that world is a charming place."--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Beautiful, memorable . . . A book full of marvels."--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Thrilling . . . Stardust reads like a mix between L. Frank Baum, the Brothers Grimm, and a Tim Burton movie script."--Dallas Morning News

"A wonderful novel . . . A pleasure to read."--Denver Post

"[A] tale about love, danger, friendship, magic, and adventure . . . a short novel that delivers big-time satisfaction."--Detroit Free Press

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