Having seen the movie Stardust I was very interested in reading the book, as books are pretty much always better then the movies. This of course was no different.
Stardust takes place in a little town called Wall in England in the early 1900’s maybe late 1800’s. It is truly a fantasy story but not in the traditional sense. All that we consider to be imaginary, unreal, or made up in the sense of creatures, people and places exist in Faerie, just across the wall. There is a market every 9 years which is the only interaction the people in the “real” world have with the inhabitants of Faerie.
Tristran is the son of a man from wall and a woman from Faerie, though he is not yet aware of this. In his efforts to win the hand of the girl of his dreams, he offers to travel beyond the wall to retrieve a fallen star for her in exchange for her hand in marriage.
Setting off on his adventure he meats some interesting people, and to his surprise finds that the fallen star is a living, thinking being. The Adventure truly begins as he attempts to bring her back to wall, forcefully chained at first. They meet all sorts of people intent on slowing them, killing them, or taking the star from him.
As they continue you also follow the stories of the sons of the Lord of Stormhold, as well as a couple witches which end up playing roles in the sotryline.
I wouldn’t say there is a surprise ending, but it is certainly not the ending that Tristran had foreseen when he started his quest, but as most fairy tales, it ends happily .
The book is beautifully written, simple and yet elegant, and I would rate as a true masterpiece of it’s age.
I did find that there were quite a bit of things added to the movie however that were not in the book. The biggest one that upset me was that Captain Shakespeare, played by Robert De Nero in the movie was a completely different person in the book. In the movie He was a cross dressing Skyship Captain, who hid his pleasures from his crew, putting on a fierce face for them.
That is a dramatic change from the tone of the book, and is a very huge character addition to add in. I feel like it is almost too big of a difference to make. The biggest reason the addition of this to the movie upsets me is because in all honesty is was one of my favorite parts of the film, and I was looking forward to reading about it, which left me disappointed.
This is of course no fault of the book and I of course will not fault the book for it .
All in all I rate this book a 4/5 and suggest that if your into fantasy style books you give it a try!
